Who lives and who dies: Role of apoptosis in quashing developmental errors.

Apoptosis is essential for normal development. Large numbers of cells are eliminated by apoptosis in early neural development and during the formation of neural connections. However, our understanding of this life-or-death decision is incomplete, because it is difficult to identify dying cells by conventional strategies. Live imaging is powerful for studying apoptosis, because it can trace a death-fated cell throughout its lifetime. The Drosophila sensory organ development is a convenient system for studying neural-cell selection via lateral inhibition. We recently showed that about 20% of the differentiating neuronal cells die during sensory organ development, which results in the characteristic spatial patterning of the sensory organs. The eliminated differentiating neurons expressed neurogenic genes and high levels of activated Notch. Thus, live imaging allowed us to document the role of apoptosis in neural progenitor selection, and revealed that Notch activation is the mechanism determining which cells die during sensory organ development.