editorial selectivetypesofautophagydownloads.hindawi.com/journals/ijcb/2012/156272.pdf ·...

Hindawi Publishing CorporationInternational Journal of Cell BiologyVolume 2012, Article ID 156272, 2 pagesdoi:10.1155/2012/156272

Editorial

Selective Types of Autophagy

Fulvio Reggiori,1 Masaaki Komatsu,2 Kim Finley,3 and Anne Simonsen4

1 Department of Cell Biology and Institute of Biomembranes, University Medical Center Utrecht, 3584 CX, Utrecht, The Netherlands2 Protein Metabolism Project, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, Tokyo 156-8506, Japan3 BioScience Center, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA4 Department of Biochemistry, Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Oslo, 0317 Oslo, Norway

Correspondence should be addressed to Anne Simonsen, [email protected]

Received 20 March 2012; Accepted 20 March 2012

Copyright © 2012 Fulvio Reggiori et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons AttributionLicense, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properlycited.

The focus of this special issue of the International Journal ofCell Biology is to underscore the recent developments in thefield of macroautophagy and how this degradative pathwayintersects with cellular metabolism, complex physiologicalfunctions, and human diseases. During the last decade,autophagy has become an expanding field in biomedical lifesciences due to its involvement with numerous intracellularprocesses. Autophagy also plays a role in pathology, and it hasthe therapeutic potential to be the target for the treatmentof specific human diseases. Early studies suggested thatautophagy was a nonselective process in which cytoplasmicstructures were randomly sequestered into autophagosomesbefore being delivered to the mammalian lysosome or theplant and yeast vacuole for degradation. Now there isgrowing evidence that unwanted cellular structures can beselectively recognized and exclusively eliminated within cells(F. Reggiori et al., “Selective types of autophagy”). This isachieved through the action of specific autophagy receptors,as reviewed by C. Behrends and S. Fulda in “Receptor proteinsin selective autophagy”) and studied by K. Marchbank et al.“MAP1B interaction with the FW domain of the autophagicreceptor Nbr1 facilitates its association to the microtubulenetwork”. Thus excess or damaged organelles including mito-chondria (A. May et al., “The many faces of mitochondrialautophagy: making sense of contrasting observations in recentresearch”; Y. Hirota et al., “The physiological role of mitophagy:new insights into phosphorylation events”), peroxisomes (A.Till et al., “Pexophagy: the selective degradation of peroxi-somes”), lipid droplets (R. Singh and A. Cuervo, “Lipophagy:connecting autophagy and lipid metabolism”), endoplasmic

reticulum and ribosomes (E. Cebollero et al., “Reticulophagyand ribophagy: regulated degradation of protein productionfactories”) can be specifically sequestered by autophagosomesand targeted to the lysosome for degradation.

Importantly, there is growing evidence that selective au-tophagy subtypes also have a wide range of physiologicalfunctions. In yeast, the cytosol-to-vacuole (Cvt) pathwaytransports hydrolases into the vacuole, which is reviewed byM. Umekawa and D. Klionsky in “The cytoplasm-to-vacuoletargeting pathway: a historical perspective”. In eukaryotes,autophagy plays a central role in both innate and acquiredimmunity. Further sequestration and elimination of invad-ing pathogens such as Salmonella and Staphylococcus aureushave been exploited to study autophagosome biogenesis(T. Noda et al., “Three-axis model for Atg recruitment inautophagy against Salmonella”; M. Mauthe et al., “WIPI-1positive autophagosome-like vesicles entrap pathogenic Staphy-lococcus aureus for lysosomal degradation”). In pancreascells, autophagy has recently been shown to specificallyturn over secretory granules, as described by M. Vaccaroin “Zymophagy: selective autophagy of secretory granules”.Dysregulation of autophagic function has been implicatedin a growing list of disease processes and has underscoredthe selective or substrate-specific versions of the pathway.Examples in this special issue include the clearance ofaggregates associated with neurological diseases, as reviewedby T. Lamark and T. Johansen in “Aggrephagy: selectivedisposal of protein aggregates by macroautophagy” and byI. Nezis in “Selective autophagy in Drosophila”. In termsof cancer biology, autophagy has been viewed as having

2 International Journal of Cell Biology

dual roles in both tumor suppression and progression. K.Hughson et al. in “Implications of therapy-induced selectiveautophagy on tumor metabolism and survival” review howactivation of autophagy selective forms can be used as apotential therapeutic approach for the treatment of specificcancers. Adding to the complexity of autophagic functionand regulation, the article by K. Juenemann and E. Reits“Alternative macroautophagic pathways” explores alternativemacroautophagic pathways that are independent of key coreautophagy components such as Beclin-1 or Atg5. We expectfuture research on the mechanism and regulation of selectiveautophagy, and the physiological importance of this pathwayin human disease will be very exciting and expand on thefindings highlighted in this issue of IJCB.

Fulvio ReggioriMaasaki Komatsu

Kim FinleyAnne Simonsen

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