Human bladder cancer (BC) is the fourth most common cancer in the United States. Investigation of the strategies aiming to elucidate the tumor growth and metastatic pathways in BC is critical for the management of this disease. Here we found that ATG7 expression was remarkably elevated in human bladder urothelial carcinoma and N-butyl-N-(4-hydroxybutyl)nitrosamine (BBN)-induced mouse invasive B...

Objective: Autophagy is highly active in ovariectomized mice experiencing hormone deprivation, especially the uterine mesenchyme. responsible for turnover of vasoactive factors uterus, which was demonstrated anti-Müllerian receptor type 2 (<i>Amhr2</i>)-Cre-driven autophagy-related gene 7 (<i>Atg7</i>) knockout (<i>Amhr-Cre/Atg7<sup>f/f</sup></i> ...

Atg5 and Atg7 have long been considered as essential molecules for autophagy. However, we found that cells lacking these molecules still form autophagic vacuoles and perform autophagic protein degradation when subjected to certain stressors. During this unconventional autophagy pathway, autophagosomes appeared to be generated in a Rab9-dependent manner by the fusion of vesicles derived from the...

Evaluation of ATG7 and LC3 Autophagy Genes Expression in Newly Diagnosed AML patients Background and aim: Autophagy, known as cell death type II, is a housekeeping pathway that currently has been worked on in matters of tumorigenesis and leukemogenesis. Therefore, in this study expression levels of ATG7 and LC3 as two key genes are targeted in AML patients. Material and method: This...

Autophagy is an evolutionary preserved process that prevents the accumulation of unwanted cytosolic material through the formation of autophagosomes. Although autophagy has been extensively studied to understand its function in normal physiology, the role of vascular smooth muscle (SM) cell (VSMC) autophagy in Ca(2+) mobilization and contraction remains poorly understood. Recent evidence shows ...

The thymic epithelium plays critical roles in the positive and negative selection of T cells. Recently, it was proposed that autophagy in thymic epithelial cells is essential for the induction of T cell tolerance to self antigens and thus for the prevention of autoimmune diseases. Here we have tested this hypothesis using mouse models in which autophagy was blocked specifically in epithelial ce...

Previous studies with mice lacking epidermal macroautophagy suggest that under pro-aging stress there is a profound change in lipid metabolism and an increased susceptibility to DNA damage cellular senescence. Thus we followed up these now cohorts of young (< 8 mo) geriatric (>16 which did or not lack Atg7 (Atg7 f/f: K14 cre+), studied the consequences chronological aging on level lipidome. Add...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic bacterium that can cause serious infection in immunocompromised individuals. Although autophagy may augment immune responses against P. aeruginosa infection in macrophages, the critical components and their role of autophagy in host defense are largely unknown. In this study, we show that P. aeruginosa infection-induced autophagy activates JAK2/STAT1α ...

Mitochondrial clearance is a well recognized but poorly understood biologic process, and reticulocytes, which undergo programmed mitochondrial clearance, provide a useful model to study this phenomenon. At the ultrastructural level, mitochondrial clearance resembles an autophagy-related process; however, the role of autophagy in mitochondrial clearance has not been established. Here we provide ...

The cause of Huntington disease (HD) is a polyglutamine repeat expansion of more than 36 units in the huntingtin protein, which is inversely correlated with the age at onset of the disease. However, additional genetic factors are believed to modify the course and the age at onset of HD. Recently, we identified the V471A polymorphism in the autophagy-related gene ATG7, a key component of the aut...