Simple nutrients bypass the requirement for HLH-30 in coupling lysosomal nutrient sensing to survival.

Lysosomes are ubiquitous acidified organelles that degrade intracellular and extracellular material trafficked via multiple pathways. Lysosomes also sense cellular nutrient levels to regulate target of rapamycin (TOR) kinase, a signaling enzyme that drives growth and suppresses activity of the MiT/TFE family of transcription factors that control biogenesis of lysosomes. In this study, we subjected worms lacking basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor 30 (hlh-30), the Caenorhabditis elegans MiT/TFE ortholog, to starvation followed by refeeding to understand how this pathway regulates survival with variable nutrient supply.