Reproduction Abstracts

Introduction: During follicular development in mammalian ovaries, the majority of follicles undergo atresia. One of the characteristics of this process is apoptotic cell death in granulosa cells. Death ligands and receptors, including Fas ligand (FasL) and Fas, have been detected in follicles and also demonstrated to be capable of inducing apoptosis in follicular cells. Decoy receptor 3 (DcR3) competes with Fas to bind FasL but lacks intracellular death domains, thus inhibitin...