Abstract
It has been known for many decades that autophagy, a conserved lysosomal degradation pathway, is highly active during differentiation and development. However, until the discovery of the autophagy-related (ATG) genes in the 1990s, the functional significance of this activity was unknown. Initially, genetic knockout studies of ATG genes in lower eukaryotes revealed an essential role for the autophagy pathway in differentiation and development. In recent years, the analyses of systemic and tissue-specific knockout models of ATG genes in mice has led to an explosion of knowledge about the functions of autophagy in mammalian development and differentiation. Here we review the main advances in our understanding of these functions.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Chieko Kishi and Satoshi Tsukamoto for preparation of the images in Fig. 1a and Fig. 1b, respectively. This work was supported by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Japan (to N.M.), the Toray Science Foundation (to N.M.), the Takeda Science Foundation (to N.M.) and National Institutes of Health grants RO1 CA85254, RO1 CA109618 and U54 AI057156 (to B.L.).
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Mizushima, N., Levine, B. Autophagy in mammalian development and differentiation. Nat Cell Biol 12, 823–830 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb0910-823
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb0910-823
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