What is autophagy, and why is it important?

Autophagy (cellular self-digestion by lysosomes) is activated in response to starvation in all eukaryotic cells, and ensures survival by recycling dispensable cellular constituents for re-use in synthetic processes. In animals, autophagy has been adopted to serve additional functions beyond starvation survival that include regulation of lifespan, stress responses, cellular homeostasis, cell death, immunity, cancer, neurodegeneration diseases, obesity and lipid metabolism, and more. The biomedical relevance of autophagy is well-established by now, also evident from the 2016 Nobel Prize awarded to a yeast autophagy researcher.

Latest news from the lab

It turned out that I am not very good at keeping our homepage up-to-date, so here are a couple of links to recent papers, PhD graduations etc:

Google Scholar

ORCID

Scopus

MTMT Hungarian publication database

PhD database