Abstract
Autophagy is an essential, homeostatic process by which cells break down their own components. Perhaps the most primordial function of this lysosomal degradation pathway is adaptation to nutrient deprivation. However, in complex multicellular organisms, the core molecular machinery of autophagy — the 'autophagy proteins' — orchestrates diverse aspects of cellular and organismal responses to other dangerous stimuli such as infection. Recent developments reveal a crucial role for the autophagy pathway and proteins in immunity and inflammation. They balance the beneficial and detrimental effects of immunity and inflammation, and thereby may protect against infectious, autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.
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Acknowledgements
The work in the authors' laboratories was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants RO1 CA109618 and U54 AI057156 (B.L.); by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan, and by the Takeda Science Foundation (N.M.); and by NIH grants RO1 AI054483, U54 AI057160, RO1 AI084887 and RO1 CA096511 and the Broad Medical Foundation (H.W.V.). We thank T. Stappenbeck for discussions, and A. Diehl and M. Harstein for scientific illustration. We apologize to those authors whose work could not be cited owing to space limitations.
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Levine, B., Mizushima, N. & Virgin, H. Autophagy in immunity and inflammation. Nature 469, 323–335 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09782
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09782
