For the first time a few research teams from Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and the Karolinska Institute, the universities of Durham (UK), Tampere (Finland), and Malaga (Spain) under the direction of Peter Bozhkov, at SLU in Uppsala, have performed a comparative study on evolutionarily conserved protein called TUDOR-SN in cell lines from mice and humans and in the plants norway spruce and mouse-ear cress. They found that the  programmed cell death (a process where cells die under controlled condition) occur in the same way in plants, animals as well as in humans.

 In both plant and animal cells that undergo programmed cell death, TUDOR-SN is degraded by specific proteins, called proteases.

The proteases in animal cells belong to a family of proteins called caspases, which are enzymes. Plants do not have caspases – instead TUDOR-SN is broken down by so-called meta-caspases, which are assumed to be ancestral to the caspases found in animal cells. For the first time, these scientists have been able to demonstrate that a protein, TUDOR-SN, is degraded by similar proteases in both plant and animal cells and that the cleavage of TUDOR-SN abrogate its pro-survival function.

Cells that lack TUDOR-SN often experience premature programmed cell death. Furthermore, functional studies at the organism level in the model plant mouse-ear cress show that TUDOR-SN is necessary for the development of embryos and pollen. And thereby TUDOR-SN is important in preventing programmed cell death from being activated in cells that are to remain alive.