The Late Stages of Autophagy

Abstract: Autophagy is highly conserved degradation process in which portions of cytosol and organelles are sequestered into a double-membrane vesicle， an autophagosome， and delivered into a degradative organelle， the vacuole/lysosome， for breakdown and eventual recycling of the resulting macromolecules. In this review， we discussed the late stages of autophagy， such as fusion of autophagosome with lysosome/vacuole， degradation of autophagosome and reformation of lysosome from hybrids. Identification of many autophagy-related genes reveals the machinery of the late stages of autophagy. Here， we summarize current information about the molecular mechanism of this process initially.

CSTR: 32200.14.cjcb.2011.01.0001