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Article Addendum
To be or not to be, the level of autophagy is the question: Dual roles of autophagy in the survival response to starvation
Chanhee Kang and Leon Avery
volume 4 | issue 1
1 January 2008Pages: 82 - 84
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Autophagy is an evolutionally conserved lysosomal pathway used to degrade and turn over long-lived proteins and cytoplasmic organelles. Since autophagy was discovered, it has been thought to act as a pro-survival response to several stresses, especially starvation, at the cell and organism levels by providing recycled metabolic substrates to maintain energy homeostasis. However, several recent studies suggest that autophagy also plays a pro-death role through an autophagic cell death pathway mostly at the cellular level. The mechanism by which autophagy could perform these seemingly opposite roles as a pro-survival and a pro-death mechanism remained elusive until recently. Using C. elegans as a model system, we found that physiological levels of autophagy promote optimal survival of C. elegans during starvation, but either insufficient or excessive levels of autophagy render C. elegans starvation-hypersensitive. Furthermore, we found that muscarinic acetylcholine receptor signaling is important in modulating the level of autophagy during starvation, perhaps through DAP kinase and RGS-2. Our recent study provides in vivo evidence that levels of autophagy are critical in deciding its promotion of either survival or death: Physiological levels of autophagy are pro-survival, whereas insufficient or excessive levels of autophagy are pro-death.
Addendum to: Kang C, You YJ, Avery L. Dual roles of autophagy in the survival of Caenorhabditis elegans during starvation. Genes Dev 2007; 21:2161-71.
Authors
Chanhee Kang
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Leon Avery
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
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.