An important new discovery has been made in the field of cell suicide by Ph.D. students Berna Sayan, Gülayşe İnce and Emre Sayan, supervised by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Öztürk at the Faculty of Science and the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics.
  Cell suicide, which is also called programmed cell death or apoptosis, is a genetic program used within the human body for the destruction of unwanted cells. Cell suicide is an operation which provides for the disposal from the body of the cancered, infected, worn-out or old cells and which is vital for a healthy life. Since cancer cells are resistant to the cell suicide procedure, some tumors are resistant to radiotherapy and chemotherapy. On the other hand, diseases such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons, AIDS and heart infarction are caused by an extreme amount of death among the cells. The research completed at Bilkent has been published under the category of Definitive Observations of Outstanding Interest, that have the potential to open up new avenues of research, in the well-known Journal of Cell Biology last week.
   The subject of the article is the discovery of a new molecule named NAPO, which identifies the cells that enter the cell suicide program. Researchers have developed a test, which distinguishes between cells that live or die using the NAPO molecule. Through the NAPO test, healthy and dying cells can be identified within a diseased tissue. This test will also be used in the development of new drugs for the prevention and cure of diseases such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons, AIDS and heart infarction.