Why should cell biologists study microbial pathogens?

Welch, Matthew D.

Finally, our understanding of signal transduction pathways and their contribution to diseases like cancer has also been heavily pacted DNA fragmentation, and loss rather than maintenance of plasma membrane integrity (Brennan and Cookson, 2000) . This mechanism of cell death was subsequently called pyroptosis, which is a proinflammatory cell death, to distinguish it from apoptosis, which is anti-inflammatory. Subsequent studies showed that caspase-1 activation involves a multiprotein complex called an inflammasome (Martinon et al., 2002) , of which there are multiple varieties with different functions in innate immunity and inflammation (Guo et al., 2015) . In addition to their roles in infection, inflammasomes also play an important role in metabolic and neurological diseases (Guo et al., 2015) . The continued study of inflammasomes will enhance our understanding of inflammatory responses to infection and of the role of inflammation in normal cell function and disease.