Are caspases involved in the death of cells with a transcriptionally inactive nucleus? Sperm and chicken erythrocytes.

We show that mouse sperm die spontaneously within 1-2 days in culture and that treatment with either staurosporine (STS) and cycloheximide (CHX) or a peptide caspase inhibitor does not accelerate or delay the cell death. Chicken erythrocytes, by contrast, are induced to die by either serum deprivation or treatment with STS and CHX, and embryonic erythrocytes are more sensitive than adult erythrocytes to both treatments. Although these erythrocyte deaths display a number of features that are characteristic of apoptosis, they are not blocked, or even delayed, by peptide caspase inhibitors, and most of the cells die without apparently activating caspases. A small proportion of the dying erythrocytes do activate caspase-3, but even these cells, which seem to be the least mature erythrocytes, die just as quickly in the presence of caspase inhibitors. Our findings raise the possibility that both mouse sperm and chicken erythrocytes have a death programme that may not depend on caspases and that chicken erythrocytes lose caspases as they mature. Chicken erythrocytes may provide a useful 'stripped down' cell system to try to identify the protein components of such a death programme, which may serve to back-up the conventional caspase-dependent suicide mechanism in many cell types.