Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) or early progenitors respond to external stimuli in bone marrow and differentiate into cell-restricted lineages of blood cells of limited life span. In leukemias, however, early hematopoietic progenitors self-renew themselves, fail to respond to differentiation signals, and do not undergo programmed cell death (apoptosis). The basic mechanisms of differentiation and apoptosis of leukemia cells have been the long-term objective of our work. By exploiting widely studied murine and human leukemic cell systems as models of hematopoietic cell differentiation, we explored the mechanisms by which pharmaceutical agents initiate differentiation in leukemic systems. In this article, we present the developmental program of MEL cells with emphasis given on the role of commitment to terminal maturation. Commitment is initiated via inducer-receptor-mediated processes and leads to discrete patterns of expression of several genes that contribute to growth arrest at the G1 phase, expression of differentiated phenotype, and differentiation-dependent apoptosis (DDA). Overall, MEL erythroid cell differentiation represents a developmental program with a highly coordinated set of processes that is "triggered" by an inducer and functions via a network of genes and proteins interacting with each other harmonically to give birth to lineage-restricted phenotype.