REVIEW article
Front. Cell Death
Sec. Non-Apoptotic Regulated Cell Death
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fceld.2025.1677498
This article is part of the Research TopicCell Death in DrosophilaView all 4 articles
Sacrificing cells of the cyst: Non-apoptotic cell death in germline cysts via acidification
Provisionally accepted
- 1Boston University, Boston, United States
- 2University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Cell death shapes multicellular organism development and sustains tissue and organ homeostasis. Great progress has been made in understanding the breadth of physiological and biochemical diversity in cell death and clearance pathways, which play vital roles in organismal development and health. While apoptosis and necrosis have been studied extensively across many model systems and contexts, the discovery of non-apoptotic paradigms of cell death and their roles in disease has greatly expanded the field. Collectively called Regulated Cell Death (RCD), these death pathways operate in a tissue and context-dependent manner. Germ cells in many organisms develop in cysts of interconnected cells, and may die in response to environmental or developmental cues. Recent findings suggest that germ cell cysts may use a common mechanism of non-apoptotic cell death involving phagocytic and lysosomal activity of surrounding somatic cells. Cyst cell death has been analyzed most thoroughly in the Drosophila adult ovary and testis, with remarkable similarity to cyst cell death in mouse adult testis and fetal ovary. In this review, we highlight recent progress in deciphering germline cyst cell death.
Keywords: Germline cyst, Ovary, Testis, phagoptosis, Phagocytosis, Drosophila
Received: 31 Jul 2025; Accepted: 14 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Bandyadka, Tohline, Wandji, Toledano and McCall. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Kimberly McCall, kmccall@bu.edu
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.