A Matter of Life or Death

Abstract
Death of retinal photoreceptor cells underlies many blinding diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration. In a Perspective, Ranganathan explores new work that starts to unravel the relation between visual signaling pathways and the processes of apoptosis and necrosis. An intriguing new finding is that accumulation of the sphingolipid ceramide stimulates both necrosis and apoptosis of photoreceptor cells in the fly ( Acharya et al.)