Autophagosome maturation

If cells starve, they use part of their cytosol and organelles and digest them – an essential process for survival of yeast and humans. This requires the ATG machinery to make an autophagosome (Nobel prize to Yoshinori Ohsumi in 2016). We study the machinery that is responsible for autophagosome biogenesis and maturation.

In the picture above, we analyzed a yeast mutant with a defect in fusion of autophagosomes with vacuoles (see Gao et al., elife 2018). At low temperature, an autophagy cargo (Atg8) arrives in the vacuole lumen. If we shift the cells to high temperature, cells still make autophagosomes (green circles), but they cannot fuse. Our group is analyzing, how the fusion machinery is recruited to and regulated at the autophagosome.