BCL2 and Cerebral ischemia: Bcl-2 has been widely studied in various models of cerebral ischemia where it exerts neuroprotection (Kilic et al., 2002; Zhao et al., 2003; Doeppner et al., 2010; Zhang et al., 2015), and bcl-2 deficient mice display prominent infarct volumes and an aggravated neurological deficit compared to wild type mice (Akhtar et al., 2004).