Endoplasmic Reticulum Stress Triggers Autophagy

Eukaryotic cells have evolved strategies to respond to stress conditions. For example, autophagy in yeast is primarily a response to the stress of nutrient limitation. Autophagy is a catabolic process for the degradation and recycling of cytosolic, long lived, or aggregated proteins and excess or defective organelles. In this study, we demonstrate a new pathway for the induction of autophagy. In the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), accumulation of misfolded proteins causes stress and activates the unfolded protein response to induce the expression of chaperones and proteins involved in the recovery process. ER stress stimulated the assembly of the pre-autophagosomal structure. In addition, autophagosome formation…