Autophagy is a bulky catabolic process that responds to nutrient homeostasis and extracellular stress signals and is a conserved mechanism in all eukaryotes. When autophagy is induced, cellular components are sequestered within an autophagosome and finally degraded by subsequent fusion with a lysosome. During this process, the ATG12-ATG5 conjugate requires 2 different binding partners, ATG16L1 for autophagosome elongation and TECPR1 for lysosomal fusion. In our current study, we describe the crystal structures of human ATG5 in complex with an N-terminal domain of ATG16L1 as well as an internal AIR domain of TECPR1. Both binding partners exhibit a similar α-helical structure containing a conserved binding motif termed AFIM. Furthermore, we characterize the critical role of the C-terminal unstructured region of the AIR domain of TECPR1. These findings are further confirmed by biochemical and cell biological analyses. These results provide new insights into the molecular details of the autophagosome maturation process, from its elongation to its fusion with a lysosome.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.4161/15548627.2014.984276 | DOI Listing |
J Genet Genomics
January 2025
Department of Medical Genetics and Center for Rare Diseases, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University School of Medicine, and Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Rare Diseases for Precision Medicine and Clinical Translation, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310009, China; Nanhu Brain-computer Interface Institute, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 311100, China; MOE Frontier Science Center for Brain Research and Brain-Machine Integration, School of Brain Science and Brain Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang 310012, China; CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Shanghai 200031, China; Lead contact. Electronic address:
Hereditary spastic paraplegias (HSPs) refer to a genetically and clinically heterogeneous group of neurodegenerative disorders characterized by the degeneration of motor neurons. To date, a significant number of patients still have not received a definite genetic diagnosis. Therefore, identifying unreported causative genes continues to be of great importance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
January 2025
Department of Molecular Sciences, Uppsala BioCenter, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Linnean Center for Plant Biology, Uppsala, Sweden.
Intracellular recycling via autophagy is governed by post-translational modifications of the autophagy-related (ATG) proteins. One notable example is ATG4-dependent delipidation of ATG8, a process that plays critical but distinct roles in autophagosome formation in yeast and mammals. Here, we aim to elucidate the specific contribution of this process to autophagosome formation in species representative of evolutionarily distant green plant lineages: unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, with a relatively simple set of ATG genes, and a vascular plant Arabidopsis thaliana, harboring expanded ATG gene families.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPLoS Pathog
January 2025
Department of Cell Biology and Molecular Genetics, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland United States of America.
Autophagy plays a crucial role in the host response to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection, yet the dynamics and regulation of autophagy induction on Mtb-containing vacuoles (MCVs) remain only partially understood. We employed time-lapse confocal microscopy to investigate the recruitment of LC3B (LC3), a key autophagy marker, to MCVs at the single cell level with our newly developed workflow for single cell and single MCV tracking and fluorescence quantification. We show that approximately 70% of MCVs exhibited LC3 recruitment but that was lost in about 40% of those MCVs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAutophagy
December 2024
Peripheral Neuropathy Research Group, Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium.
HSPB1 [heat shock protein family B (small) member 1] and HSPB8 are essential molecular chaperones for neuronal proteostasis, as they prevent protein aggregation. Mutant HSPB1 and HSPB8 primarily harm peripheral neurons, resulting in axonal Charcot-Marie-Tooth neuropathies (CMT2). Macroautophagy/autophagy is a shared mechanism by which HSPB1 and HSPB8 mutations cause neuronal dysfunction.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAutophagy
December 2024
Division of Pediatric Hematology and Oncology, Department of Pediatrics, The Pennsylvania State University College of Medicine, Hershey, PA, USA.
Macroautophagy/autophagy, an evolutionarily conserved cellular degradation pathway, involves phagophores that sequester cytoplasmic constituents and mature into autophagosomes for subsequent lysosomal delivery. The gene family, comprising the and subfamilies in mammals, encodes ubiquitin-like proteins that are conjugated to phagophore membranes during autophagosome biogenesis. A central question in the field is how Atg8-family proteins are precisely involved in autophagosome formation, which remains controversial and challenging, at least in part due to the short lifespan of phagophores.
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