What is Autophagy

>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=NF3HtMqy__A

Hope this educational video helps teach you more about autophagy. Scroll down for the video transcript! • Credits: • A. Clément • S. Karthikeyan • S. Shuai • C. Wong • K. Yang • Transcript: • Picture this. It’s 2050 and the world is in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. You’re stranded in the remains of a building and you’re starving and exhausted from running from your walking-dead family members. Your body begins doing something EXTRAORDINARY. To survive, your body undergoes a mechanism to degrade proteins in your cells into amino acids to be used as an energy source for your whole body. This process is called autophagy, which literally means “self-eating”. • Autophagy is a homeostatic mechanism that regulates the amount of harmful molecules and recycling that goes on in the cell. It’s essentially the orderly degradation and recycling of cellular components. It comes in many forms. Today, we’ll look at macroautophagy, microautophagy, and chaperone-mediated autophagy. • Macroautophagy is induced when a stress signal is received by the cell. This stress signal causes a cascade of reactions that ultimately generates PI3P on the isolation membrane to recruit factors necessary for elongation. This is now the phagophore and this elongates further to engulf the cargo to be digested. This membrane-bound cargo is now called the autophagosome. A lysosome then fuses with the autophagosome to form an autolysosome. A lysosome is an acidic membrane-bound organelle that contains proteases to degrade proteins. The proteases from the lysosome can now digest the cargo in the autolysosome and release nutrients and metabolites. • A similar process occurs in microautophagy. Instead of a phagophore engulfing the cargo, the lysosome itself invaginates to engulf the cytoplasmic materials, and then digests them. • In chaperone-mediated autophagy, the cargo made up of cytosolic proteins are individually recognized by chaperone proteins, which then translocate them across the lysosome membrane for degradation. • Autophagy serves many functions in the body. The first, starvation adaptation, we already discussed when we were trying to survive the zombie apocalypse - using degraded amino acids as an energy source during starvation. • Autophagy is also involved in the elimination of excessive or harmful materials such as proteins, organelles, invasive bacteria and virus particles. • Autophagy is also involved in development. It encourages the growth of nerve cells, and improves cognitive function and neuroplasticity. It also supports the growth of heart cells, and protects against heart disease. • Autophagy is also involved in anti-aging and tumor suppression. It is one of the body’s ways of getting rid of damaged cells to regenerate healthier, new cells. Autophagy also kills cells in the form of programmed cell death which prevents damage to tissues and organs. • As you can see, autophagy plays many important roles in the body and the disruption of autophagy can lead to many harmful disorders. • One example of an autophagic disorder is Vici syndrome. In your cells, there’s a protein called EPG5, which is involved in the fusion of the lysosome and phagophore. People with Vici syndrome possess a mutation in this gene, which interferes with the interaction between the two organelles. This then causes the accumulation of non-degradative autolysosomes, which affects the cell’s ability to remove harmful materials and to recycle nutrients. This can cause a host of problems affecting the brain, eyes, heart, and immune system. • Recently, scientists have taken a particular interest in studying autophagy for use in anti-aging and tumor suppression. Autophagy is best known as the body’s way of turning the clock back and creating younger cells. When your cells are stressed, autophagy is increased in order to protect you, which helps enhance your lifespan. Autophagy also declines as we age, so this means cells that no longer work or may do harm are allowed to multiply, which manifests as cancer. This is why some researchers are looking at the possibility that autophagy may lower the risk of cancer. • Research in autophagy is constantly developing and we never know what we’ll discover next! Next time you’re caught in a zombie apocalypse, your body will know what to do to survive. Who knew “eating yourself” could be so helpful? • Sources: • https://greatist.com/live/autophagy-f... • https://draxe.com/health/anti-aging/b... • https://molecular-cancer.biomedcentra... • https://www.news-medical.net/life-sci... • https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/20... • http://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/21/... • https://clincancerres.aacrjournals.or... • https://www-sciencedirect-com.proxy.b... - http://genesdev.cshlp.org/content/21/... • https://jcs.biologists.org/content/12...

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