Entosis and Related Forms of Cell Death within Cells

By eliminating the unneeded or mutant cells, programmed cell death actively participates in a wide range of biological processes from embryonic development to homeostasis maintenance in adult. Continuing efforts have identified multiple cell death pathways, with apoptosis, necrosis and autophage the mostly studied. Recently a unique cell death pathway called "cell-in-cell death" has been defined. Unlike traditional cell death pathways, cell-in-cell death, characterized by cell death within another cell, is triggered by the invasion of one cell into its neighbor and executed by either lysosome-dependent degradation or caspase-dependent apoptosis. With remarkable progresses on cell-in-cell over past few years, multiple mechanisms, including entosis, cannibalism and emperitosis, are found to be responsible for cell-in-cell death. Some key questions, such as specific biochemical markers to distinguish precisely the properties of different cell-in-cell structures and the physiological and pathological relevance, remain to be addressed. In light of this situation and a surge of interests, leading scientists in this field intend to share with readers current research progresses on cell-in-cell structures from different model systems through this special edition on cell-in-cell. The mechanistic advances will be highlighted while the future researches be speculated.