Autophagy is a catabolic pathway in which normal or dysfunctional cellular components that accumulate during growth and differentiation are degraded via the lysosome and are recycled. During autophagy, cytoplasmic LC3 protein is lipidated and recruited to the autophagosomal membranes. The autophagosome then fuses with the lysosome to form the autolysosome, where the breakdown of the autophagoso...

Disruption of autophagy leads to accumulation of intracellular multilamellar inclusions morphologically similar to organised smooth endoplasmic reticulum (OSER) membranes. However, the relation of these membranous compartments to autophagy is unknown. The purpose of this study was to test whether OSER plays a role in the autophagic protein degradation pathway. Here, GFP-LC3 is shown to localise...

To determine the expression of mTOR, Becline-1, LC3 and p62 in the peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) and assess their relationship with disease activity and immunologic features. The expression of mTOR, Becline-1, LC3 and p62 was detected by RT-PCR in 81 SLE subjects and 86 age- and sex-matched healthy controls. Data regarding demographics and clin...

Our previous studies suggested that enhanced fibronectin mRNA translation in ductus arteriosus compared with aortic smooth muscle cells is related to increased expression of light chain 3 (LC3) of microtubule-associated protein 1, which binds an AU-rich element in the 3' untranslated region of fibronectin mRNA. We therefore hypothesized that microtubules are involved in LC3-mediated fibronectin...

MicroRNA-9 (miR-9) has been shown to promote the differentiation of bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells into neuronal cells, but the precise mechanism is unclear. Our previous study confirmed that increased autophagic activity improved the efficiency of neuronal differentiation in bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells. Accumulating evidence reveals that miRNAs adjust the autophagic pathways. This s...

Malignant neuroblastoma is an extracranial solid tumor that usually occurs in children. Autophagy, which is a survival mechanism in many solid tumors including malignant neuroblastoma, deters the efficacy of conventional chemotherapeutic agents. To mimic starvation, we used 200 nM rapamycin that induced autophagy in human malignant neuroblastoma SK-N-BE2 and IMR-32 cells in cell culture and ani...

Autophagy is an intracellular process in which a cell digests its own constituents via lysosomal degradative pathway. Though autophagy has been shown in several cardiac diseases like heart failure, hypertrophy and ischaemic cardiomyopathy, the role and the regulation of autophagy is still largely unknown. Bcl-2-associated athanogene (BAG-1) is a multifunctional pro-survival molecule that binds ...

Macroautophagy allows for bulk degradation of cytosolic components in lysosomes. Overexpression of GFP/RFP-LC3/GABARAP is commonly used to monitor autophagosomes, a hallmark of autophagy, despite artifacts related to their overexpression. Here, we developed new sensors that detect endogenous LC3/GABARAP proteins at the autophagosome using an LC3-interacting region (LIR) and a short hydrophobic ...

Macroautophagy is a major catabolic pathway that impacts cell survival, differentiation, tumorigenesis, and neurodegeneration. Although bulk degradation sustains carbon sources during starvation, autophagy contributes to shrinkage of differentiated neuronal processes. Identification of autophagy-related genes has spurred rapid advances in understanding the recruitment of microtubule-associated ...

Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common cancer of the bone. Chemotherapy is commonly used for the clinical treatment of OS. However, chemoresistance to cisplatin [also known as diamminedichloridoplatinum (II) (DDP)] is a major obstacle for OS therapy, the underlying mechanism of which is not fully understood. The present study aimed to investigate the role of microRNA (miR)-199a-5p in the regulati...