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Article Addendum
Detection of Autophagy in Tissue by Standard Immunohistochemistry: Possibilities and Limitations
Wim Martinet, Guido R.Y. De Meyer, Luc Andries, Arnold G Herman and Mark M. Kockx
volume 2 | issue 1
January/February/March 2006Pages: 55 - 57
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Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) is currently the standard method to monitor autophagy in tissue. Because TEM is labor intensive, we recently questioned whether marker proteins could be found for unambiguous detection of autophagy in tissue using standard immunohistochemical techniques. Our findings indicated that the identification of autophagy-specific biomarkers for tissue is highly compromised due to lack of differential gene expression. In this respect, TEM remains an indispensable technique for evaluation of autophagy in situ. Nevertheless, immunohistochemical staining of microtubule-associated protein 1 light chain 3 (LC3) appeared to be a valuable technique to detect autophagosome formation in tissue but only when this protein is overexpressed, e.g. in GFP-LC3 transgenic animals. Furthermore, demonstration of granular cytoplasmic ubiquitin inclusions by immunohistochemistry may be an attractive technique to measure autophagic cell degeneration in some human pathologies such as neurodegenerative diseases, heart failure and atherosclerosis.
Addenda to:
In Situ Detection of Starvation-Induced Autophagy
W. Martinet, G.R.Y. De Meyer, L. Andries, A.G. Herman and M.M. Kockx
J Histochem Cytochem 2005; In press
We now provide open access to journal articles published online for one year or more. This article may be downloaded at the following link:
Download PDF If the document does not open, please right-click on the link (control-click on a Macintosh) and select the option to save the file to disk.