To be or not to be cell autonomous? Autophagy says both.

Although cells are a part of the whole organism, classical dogma emphasizes that individual cells function autonomously. Many physiological and pathological conditions, including cancer, and metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases, have been considered mechanistically as cell-autonomous pathologies, meaning those that damage or defect within a selective population of affected cells suffice to produce disease. It is becoming clear, however, that cells and cellular processes cannot be considered in isolation. Best known for shuttling cytoplasmic content to the lysosome for degradation and repurposing of recycled building blocks such as amino acids, nucleotides, and fatty acids, autophagy serves a housekeeping function in every cell and plays key roles in cell development, immunity, tissue remodeling, and homeostasis with the surrounding environment and the distant organs. In this review, we underscore the importance of taking interactions with the microenvironment into consideration while addressing the cell autonomous and non-autonomous functions of autophagy between cells of the same and different types and in physiological and pathophysiological situations.

Fine-tuning autophagy: from transcriptional to posttranslational regulation.

Macroautophagy (hereafter called autophagy) is a vacuolar lysosomal pathway for degradation of intracellular material in eukaryotic cells. Autophagy plays crucial roles in tissue homeostasis, in adaptation to stress situations, and in immune and inflammatory responses. Alteration of autophagy is associated with cancer, diabetes and obesity, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disease, autoimmune disease, infection, and chronic inflammatory disease. Autophagy is controlled by autophagy-related (ATG) proteins that act in a coordinated manner to build up the initial autophagic vacuole named the autophagosome. It is now known that the activities of ATG proteins are modulated by posttranslational modifications such as phosphorylation, ubiquitination, and acetylation. Moreover, transcriptional and epigenetic controls are involved in the regulation of autophagy in stress situations. Here we summarize and discuss how posttranslational modifications and transcriptional and epigenetic controls regulate the involvement of autophagy in the proteostasis network.