Morte cellulare programmata in colture cellulari vegetali

Programmed cell death is a genetically regulated process of cell suicide present in all organisms. In plants as in animals, PCD is an essential process during growth and development. Because of the difficulties to perform detailed experiments at cellular and molecular level in plant, due to the complexity of plant tissues and organs, we decide to choose suspension cell cultures as our initial model system. In fact, the cell cultures offer the best experimental system to study PCD events, in detail, at cellular and molecular level. Characterization of PCD events induced by two inducers such as cytochinins and cadmiun are reported, showing some commonality in their signalling pathways.