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Abstract
The past decade and a half has witnessed the discovery of a large, evolutionarily
conserved family of cellular genes bearing homology to the prototype baculovirus Inhibitor
of Apoptosis (IAP). The logical decision in the field to also refer to these cellular
proteins as IAPs fails to do justice to this versatile group of factors that play
a wide range of roles in eukaryotic development and homeostasis which include, but
are not limited to, the regulation of programmed cell death. Here we describe the
shared functional characteristics of several well-characterized IAPs whose defining
motifs place them more in the category of multifunctional modular protein interaction
domains.