Autophagy Essay

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Introduction Autophagy or “macroautophagy” describes a conserved intracellular catabolic mechanism for degrading and recycling long-lived macromolecules (e.g. Proteins, lipids) and organelles (e.g. Mitochondria) through lysosomes and it is composed of the Greek words auto meaning 'self' and phagy, meaning 'to eat'. It was at the CIBA foundation symposium on lysosomes in 1963 that autophagy was first coined by Christian de Duve (Satsanji et al., 2009), who in fact was the discoverer of lysosomes (Piacentini et al., 2012). Even though it was discovered over 60 years ago, it's only been in the last 10 years that the molecular mechanisms have been elucidated through the discovery of autophagy related genes (ATGs) (Klionsky et Yang 2010) and it seems to have evolved as a cell stress response to starvation and to maintaining cellular homoeostasis as a means to exert protein/organelle quality control thus establishing a basal role of autophagy in cells (Lotze et al., 2010), through degradation of worn out organelles/proteins. During autophagy, an isolation membrane is formed in specific pockets of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) called 'omegasomes' (Piacentini et al., 2012), and subsequently wraps around portions of the cytoplasm to form a double-membrane organelle which is known as the autophagosome. The materials that are engulfed by the autophagosome are then degraded by the fusion of the autophagosome with late endosomes or lysosomes by the action of hydrolases and the resulting contents (e.g. Precursors of certain macromolecules, components of the autophagic machinery) are released into the cytosol so they can be recycled by the cell. Given this important role, it is not surprising that autophagy has a number of crucial roles in the cell. It can be used by cells to turn over long-lived proteins in the cytoplasm which can supply the cell with nutrients for certain

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