Autophagy

Autophagy, also known as macroautophagy, supplies alternative fuel for cells that are under environmental stress conditions (including starvation, growth factor deprivation, and hypoxia). This highly regulated and catabolic cell process recycles and repurposes pre-existing organelles as well as existing macromolecules and is a very evolutionarily conserved and fundamental process to preserve cells under adverse conditions.

Autophagy, a protein degradation process through autophagosome-lysosomal pathway, is important for cellular homeostasis and plays a role in many diseases. To help researchers learn more about this process and the products available for its study, Novus Biologicals has released a new Autophagy catalog.

ATG5, or Autophagy Related 5, is a protein crucial for autophagy. Autophagy is a mechanism in which dysfunctional or pathogenic cells or cellular components are degraded and sometimes recycled. This process happens when ATG5 conjugates with another protein and associates with a cup shaped isolation membrane.

ATG5 is a member of the ATG family that regulates autophagy, the evolutionary conserved homeostatic response to a diverse variety of self- and foreign-originating cellular stresses. ATG5 is ubiquitously expressed in cells and found co-localized with cytoplasmic non-muscle actin under normal resting conditions, but upon the triggering of apoptosis, ATG5 expression dramatically ramps up, and ATG5 directly conjugates with other related ATG family proteins to form autophagosomes.

Beclin 1 is the first mammalian gene identified as a mediator of autophagy, and plays important roles in development, tumorigenesis, and neurodegeneration.

PINK1 is a protein serine/threonine kinase (PTK) that protects the organelles from cellular stress and controls selective autophagy to clear damage. Exner, et. al. were among the first to report that PINK1 deficiency in humans was linked to autosomal recessive occurrences of Parkinson's disease (PD) and neurogenerative pathology (1).

LC3 is distributed ubiquitously in eukaryotes and is a heavily studied autophagy biomarker that was originally identified as a subunit of MAP1A and MAP1B. Because autophagy is a crucial process for maintaining normal neural networks and function, understanding neuronal autophagy is important. Young's group at Univ.

LC3B is subunit component of the LC3 autophagy biomarker associated with microtubule-associated proteins MAP1A and MAP1B and one of the best characterized markers to date. In resting state, it is cytosolic, but upon activation, is lapidated and becomes embedded in the autophagosomal membrane.

Autophagy is a conserved mechanism whereby cells form double membrane autophagosomes to sequester cytoplasmic components for subsequent destruction by fusion with lysosomes (eukaryotes) or vacuoles (yeast). Targets of autophagy include aging proteins, damaged organelles and invasive pathogens, and the resulting breakdown products can be recycled back to the cytoplasm for re-use under conditions of starvation (1).

LC3B, also known as microtubule-associated protein 1 light chain 3 beta (MAP1LC3B), is an autophagy gene that contributes appreciably to protein degradation. Autophagy is a highly synchronized and dynamic catabolic degradation activity that plays an essential role in cellular maintenance, development, antigen presentation and cell death.