Scientific Review on Autophagy

[TelopeaBlue]

This appears to be open access, so I guess even those of you who don't have access to an academic institution library should be able to read it.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31277291

The title says it all - A Comprehensive Review of Autophagy and Its Various Roles in Infectious, Non-Infectious, and Lifestyle Diseases: Current Knowledge and Prospects for Disease Prevention, Novel Drug Design, and Therapy. And if that isn't enough to pique interest, I'll include a snippet from the abstract...

Autophagy (self-eating) is a conserved cellular degradation process that plays important roles in maintaining homeostasis and preventing nutritional, metabolic, and infection-mediated stresses. Autophagy dysfunction can have various pathological consequences, including tumor progression, pathogen hyper-virulence, and neurodegeneration. This review describes the mechanisms of autophagy and its associations with other cell death mechanisms, including apoptosis, necrosis, necroptosis, and autosis. Autophagy has both positive and negative roles in infection, cancer, neural development, metabolism, cardiovascular health, immunity, and iron homeostasis.

It is a long read of 40 pages of text with > 500 references. So you are warned. Comprehensive reviews like these are where I like to start when I need to understand a new area that isn't in the crosshairs of my day-to-day work. However, discussion of autophagy on other threads got me questioning, as I had only ever encountered the concept as a mechanism of cell death (not cell clean up). I have yet to more than skim the article, but it's on the docket for the weekend.

[Flo]

Hi TelopeaBlue,

Thanks for sharing this article - I can's say I'm an expert but I'll be sure to have a quick look at it!
Knowledge is power, right?!

Comprehensive reviews like these are where I like to start when I need to understand a new area that isn't in the crosshairs of my day-to-day work.

Flo