Cell death goes LIVE: Technological advances in real-time tracking of cell death

Cell population can be viewed as a quantum system, which like Schrödinger’s cat exists as a combination of survival- and death-allowing states. Tracking and understanding cell-to-cell variability in processes of high spatio-temporal complexity such as cell death is at the core of current systems biology approaches. As probabilistic modeling tools attempt to impute information inaccessible by current experimental approaches, advances in technologies for single-cell imaging and omics (proteomics, genomics, metabolomics) should go hand in hand with the computational efforts. Over the last few years we have made exciting technological advances that allow studies of cell death dynamically in real-time and with the unprecedented accuracy. These approaches are based on innovative fluorescent assays and recombinant proteins, bioelectrical properties of cells, and more recently also on state-of-the-art optical spectroscopy. Here, we review current status of the most innovative analytical technologies for dynamic tracking of cell death, and address the interdisciplinary promises and future challenges of these methods.