Purpose of review: To give an overview of autophagy and its effects on innate and adaptive immunity and touch on some of the roles of autophagy in disease.
Recent findings: Precise regulation of autophagy is necessary to maintain metabolic equilibrium, immune homeostasis, delineate cell fate and influence host cell responses to cytosolic pathogens. A growing number of studies have implicated that inactivation of autophagy-selective responses contributes to inflammatory disorders, neurodegeneration and cancer, but the precise steps at which disease-associated autophagy-related (ATG) genes affect autophagy pathways is unknown at present.
Summary: In eukaryotic cells autophagy is constitutively active at low levels, whereas significant up-regulation occurs in response to a multitude of stresses. Autophagy has achieved notoriety as a perturbed biological process in many disease states and an exponential increase of studies attribute roles for autophagy in innate and adaptive immunity. Understanding how individual disease-associated ATG genes function will lead to a better understanding of and potentially novel therapies for treating the diseases in which they are involved.