Biology is the study of life and life systems. Until recently, biologists have concentrated in examining how cells proliferate, differentiate, and survive in biological systems. Although such studies reveal extremely interesting insights into the complexity of living organisms, there is much more to this story. Just as cells live, cells must also eventually die. The study of how and why cells die has become the focus much scientific research over the past decade. Because the regulation of the number and specificity of cells in the immune system is critical to the life of a mammalian organism, researchers began to investigate how this strict control was accomplished. It was found that large quantities of immature T cells die in the course of their development by a specific type of cell death process coined apoptosis. This Ph.D. dissertation was directed towards examining the mechanisms involved in the regulation of thymocyte apoptosis in a murine model system. The first portion of the project involved isolating differentially regulated genes using either a plus/minus or subtractive hybridization screening strategy The second component of this dissertation investigated possible roles molecular oxygen and/or free radicals play during thymocyte apoptosis. Results from these studies both identified numerous putative death transcripts as well as revealed the requirement for oxygen during cell death in thymocytes induced by specific stimuli.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-7637 |
| Date | 01 January 1996 |
| Creators | McLaughlin, Kelly Ann |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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