Lysis
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In biology and medicine, lysis (via French from the learned Greek λύσις, "[dissolution]"; also more originally lysis) refers to the disintegration of a cell by damage to or dissolution of the outer cell membrane (necrosis).
In principle, this occurs in all conceivable tissue damage with cell death, but is of particular importance in the following situations:
- In the course of the so-called programmed cell death, the physiological, among other things hormonally mediated and genetically controlled apoptosis, e.g. during growth, maturation and tissue differentiation, old, superfluous or obstructive cells finally lyse in the tissue composite.
- For example, the healthy immune system uses special T-lymphocytes, so-called cytotoxic killer cells, to ensure that degenerated tumour cells or host cells containing viruses or parasites that have been recognised as infected are lysed and rapidly degraded.
- However, the undisturbed replication cycle of many viruses, the infection cycle, also ends with the lytic rupture of the cell membrane of the host cell, but then without preferential degradation of the remains: only then are the virus particles that have matured in the cell released into the environment.
- In biological research (biochemistry, molecular biology, cell biology), lysis also refers to the active disruption of cells from tissue or cell culture in order to access proteins and DNA inside the cell. The cells are lysed by mechanical (vortex mixer, ultrasound, etc.) and/or chemical means (caustic soda, etc.). The result is called lysate and can be used for follow-up experiments or in drug production. Hypotonic lysis is often used for subsequent cell fractionation.
In medical jargon, lysis is also short for thrombolysis, a mostly drug-based therapy against blood clots, often used in emergency medicine in cases of suspected myocardial infarction or pulmonary embolism only a few hours old, also in cases of a freshly confirmed non-bleeding stroke.
See also
- Hemolysis
- Autolysis
- Dialysis
- Anxiolysis
- Osteolysis
