Establishment of a novel fluorescence-based method to evaluate chaperone-mediated autophagy in a single neuron.

Background: Chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) is a selective autophagy-lysosome protein degradation pathway. The role of CMA in normal neuronal functions and in neural disease pathogenesis remains unclear, in part because there is no available method to monitor CMA activity at the single-cell level.

Methodology/principal Findings: We sought to establish a single-cell monitoring method by visualizing translocation of CMA substrates from the cytosol to lysosomes using the HaloTag (HT) system.