Death Mask

Death has many faces – as well as there being different types of cellular death, one called programmed cell death (apoptosis), can play protector (eradicating faulty cells), sculptor (eg. removing cells to define finger shapes during development), or destroyer. Nerve cell death by apoptosis is well known as a marker of neurodegenerative diseases, such as glaucoma and Alzheimer's. Reaction with a fluorescently-tagged protein called annexin-V has long been used in research to highlight apoptosing cells in samples, and in the early noughties a method was developed to track such cells directly in patient's retinas to identify disease and its progression. Now, however, researchers studying the retina in live mice (pictured), reveal that annexin-V (magenta) can also react with cells that aren't in the process of dying – a population of microglia (a type of immune myeloid cell, all stained green here). So, it appears that more precision is needed when homing in on dying retinal cells – there's a risk they're being obscured by annexin-V-positive myeloid cells.

Written by Lindsey Goff

Lindsey Goff

Editor-in-Chief

Formerly immunologist for Cancer Research UK, Lindsey has since moved into the field of scientific publishing. She looks after all BPoD editorial matters.

• Image from work by Kiyoharu J. Miyagishima & Francisco M. Nadal-Nicolás, and colleagues
• Retinal Neurophysiology Section, National Eye Institute, NIH, Bethesda, MD, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
• Published in in Neural Regeneration Research, 2025