Eat Me or Die

Abstract

During embryonic development, the sculpting of many tissues depends on waves of apoptotic cell death among different cell populations. Unfortunately, at least in higher animals with sophisticated immune systems, dying cells must be engulfed by phagocytes to prevent a massive autoimmune response. In their Perspective, Savill et al. discuss new work (Li et al., Wang et al.) that identifies a key receptor expressed by macrophages, PSR, that is essential for cell corpse engulfment.