Per aspera ad astra: from early T-cell development to accelerating late T-cell apoptosis

A sophisticated hunt for genes differentially expressed during early T-cell development has led to the identification of Gimap4, a gene with a promising expression profile during T-cell development, However, gene-knockout reveals that Gimap4 does not play a role in T-cell development, selection, and activation, but that instead it acts as an accelerator of T-cell death during the final transition from a cell with apoptotic morphology to one with a disintegrated plasma membrane.