Cell cycle and apoptosis: A review

Cancer is characterized by abnormally excessive cell proliferation. Cell proliferation, the process by which a cell grows and divides to produce two daughter cells. Each of these daughter cells divides to produce two new cells, steps that are called cell cycle. Meanwhile, apoptosis is a highly regulated process of cell death, which is involved not only in the development of shape and morphogenesis, but also in controlling the number of cells and getting rid of damaged cells, thus playing an important role in tumor suppression. Apoptosis describes the orchestrated collapse of a cell characterized by membrane blebbing, cell shrinkage, condensation of chromatin, and brief fragmentation of DNA. In this study, Scopus and PubMed scientific databases as well as Google Scholar search engine were used in order to broadly search for scholarly literature.