In plants, programmed cell death (PCD) is an important mechanism that controls normal growth and development as well as many defence responses. At present, research on PCD in different plant species is actively carried out due to the possibilities offered by modern methods in molecular biology and the increasing amount of genome data. The pine seed provides a favourable model for PCD because it represents an interesting inheritance of seed tissues as well as an anatomically well-described embryogenesis during which several tissues die via morphologically different PCD processes.