Pyroptosis is a form of programmed cell death

Programmed cell death

Programmed cell-death is death of a cell in any form, mediated by an intracellular program. PCD is carried out in a regulated process which generally confers advantage during an organism's life-cycle...

 associated with antimicrobial

Antimicrobial

An anti-microbial is a substance that kills or inhibits the growth of microorganisms such as bacteria, fungi, or protozoans. Antimicrobial drugs either kill microbes or prevent the growth of microbes...

 responses during inflammation

Inflammation

Inflammation is part of the complex biological response of vascular tissues to harmful stimuli, such as pathogens, damaged cells, or irritants. Inflammation is a protective attempt by the organism to remove the injurious stimuli and to initiate the healing process...

. In contrast to apoptosis

Apoptosis

Apoptosis is the process of programmed cell death that may occur in multicellular organisms. Biochemical events lead to characteristic cell changes and death. These changes include blebbing, cell shrinkage, nuclear fragmentation, chromatin condensation, and chromosomal DNA fragmentation...

, pyroptosis requires the function of caspase

Caspase

Caspases, or cysteine-aspartic proteases or cysteine-dependent aspartate-directed proteases are a family of cysteine proteases that play essential roles in apoptosis , necrosis, and inflammation....

-1, and has been studied in the context of salmonella-infected macrophages.
Recently, it was shown that Caspase-1 is activated during pyroptosis by a large supramolecular complex termed the pyroptosome . Only one large pyroptosome is formed in each macrophage, within minutes after infection. Biochemical and Mass Spectroscopic analysis revealed that this pyroptosome is largely composed of dimers of the adaptor protein ASC.