- 【Updated on May 12, 2025】 Integration of CiNii Dissertations and CiNii Books into CiNii Research
- Trial version of CiNii Research Knowledge Graph Search feature is available on CiNii Labs
- 【Updated on June 30, 2025】Suspension and deletion of data provided by Nikkei BP
- Regarding the recording of “Research Data” and “Evidence Data”
Impairment of autophagy: From hereditary disorder to drug intoxication
Search this article
Description
At first, the molecular mechanism of autophagy was unveiled in a unicellular organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae (budding yeast), followed by the discovery that the basic mechanism of autophagy is conserved in multicellular organisms including mammals. Although autophagy was considered to be a non-selective bulk protein degradation system to recycle amino acids during periods of nutrient starvation, it is also believed to be an essential mechanism for the selective elimination of proteins/organelles that are damaged under pathological conditions. Research advances made using autophagy-deficient animals have revealed that impairments of autophagy often underlie the pathogenesis of hereditary disorders such as Danon, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and Huntington's diseases, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. On the other hand, there are many reports that drugs and toxicants, including arsenic, cadmium, paraquat, methamphetamine, and ethanol, induce autophagy during the development of their toxicity on many organs including heart, brain, lung, kidney, and liver. Although the question as to whether autophagic machinery is involved in the execution of cell death or not remains controversial, the current view of the role of autophagy during cell/tissue injury is that it is an important, often essential, cytoprotective reaction; disturbances in cytoprotective autophagy aggravate cell/tissue injuries. The purpose of this review is to provide (1) a gross summarization of autophagy processes, which are becoming more important in the field of toxicology, and (2) examples of important studies reporting the involvement of perturbations in autophagy in cell/tissue injuries caused by acute as well as chronic intoxication.
Journal
-
- Toxicology
-
Toxicology 311 (3), 205-215, 2013-09
Elsevier BV