Phagocytes are cells that protect the body by ingesting harmful foreign particles, bacteria, and dead or dying cells. Their name comes from the Greek phagein, "to eat" or "devour", and "-cyte", the suffix in biology denoting "cell", from the Greek kutos, "hollow vessel". They are essential for fighting infections and for subsequent immunity. Phagocytes are important throughout the animal kingdom and are highly developed within vertebrates. One litre of human blood contains about six billion phagocytes. They were discovered in 1882 by Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov while he was studying starfish larvae. Mechnikov was awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery. Phagocytes occur in many species; some amoebae behave like macrophage phagocytes, which suggests that phagocytes appeared early in the evolution of life.
Scanning electron micrograph of a neutrophil phagocytosing anthrax bacilli (orange)
Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov in his laboratory
Micrograph of Gram-stained pus showing Neisseria gonorrhoeae bacteria inside phagocytes and their relative sizes
Monocytes in blood (Giemsa stain)
Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death that occurs in multicellular organisms and in some eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms such as yeast. Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes (morphology) and death. These changes include blebbing, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, DNA fragmentation, and mRNA decay. The average adult human loses 50 to 70 billion cells each day due to apoptosis. For the average human child between 8 and 14 years old, each day the approximate loss is 20 to 30 billion cells.
An etoposide-treated DU145 prostate cancer cell exploding into a cascade of apoptotic bodies. The sub images were extracted from a 61-hour time-lapse microscopy video, created using quantitative phase-contrast microscopy. The optical thickness is color-coded. With increasing thickness, color changes from gray to yellow, red, purple and finally black. See the video at The Cell: An Image Library
John Sulston won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2002, for his pioneering research on apoptosis.
A section of mouse liver showing several apoptotic cells, indicated by arrows
A section of mouse liver stained to show cells undergoing apoptosis (orange)