Becker's World of the Cell 9th Edition by Lewis Kleinsmith, Jeff Hardin, Gregory Paul Bertoni

Exercise 9

Apoptosis and Medicine. A current focus of molecular medicine is to trigger or prevent apoptosis in specific cells. Several components of the apoptotic pathway are being targeted using this approach. For each of the following, state specifically how the treatment would be expected to stimulate or inhibit apoptosis.
(a)Cells are treated with a small molecule called pifithrin- , which was originally isolated for its ability to reversibly block p53-dependent transcriptional activation.
(b)Exposing cells to recombinant TRAIL protein, a ligand for the tumor necrosis factor family of receptors.
(c)Treatment of cells with organic compounds that enter the cell and bind with high affinity to the active site of caspase-3.