Collection 

Webfocus on Autophagy

Autophagy is used by cells to deliver cytoplasmic material to lysosomes for degradation. Under nutrient deprivation conditions, autophagy is used to degrade cytoplasmic substrates to maintain cellular bioenergetics. Autophagy is also augmented to clear protein aggregates and damaged organelles from the cytoplasm, and in this way alleviates cell stress. In addition to its defined role in cell stress remediation, autophagy also participates in a form of cell death. Significantly, autophagy has been implicated in a wide variety of disorders, including cancer, neurodegeneration, infection and inflammatory diseases, illustrating the interest in modulation of autophagy for disease therapies.

The interest in understanding how autophagy is regulated and functions in different cells, tissues and diseases is highlighted by our journals. In this WebFocus, we report some recently published papers about autophagy in our journals. We hope that this selection is of interest to our readers.

Reviews

Editorials

Original Papers