Editorial: Autophagy in Endocrine-Metabolic Diseases Associated With Aging

DE TATA, VINCENZO; GONZALEZ, CLAUDIO DANIEL; VACCARO, MARIA INES

Frontiers in Endocrinology

Frontiers Media S.A.

Año: 2020 vol. 11 p. 1 - 10

Editorial on the Research TopicAutophagy in Endocrine-Metabolic Diseases Associated With AgingAutophagy is a highly regulated self-degradative process of cytoplasmic cellular constituentsusually activated under certain conditions such as starvation or other different forms of cell stressthat result in breakdown proteins and other cell components to obtain energy. Autophagy isalso responsible for removing damaged or aged organelles, eliminating different pathogens andmisfolded, aggregated, or altered proteins. Autophagy is an evolutionarily biologically conservedprocess that sequesters and delivers cytoplasmic components to the lysosome for degradation.It is also involved in the removal of cells that have undergone classical apoptosis. Autophagyis commonly associated with cell survival mechanisms: its dysregulation, however, may be alsoassociated with cell death. In the classical view, according to the pathway that cargo follows toreach the lysosomal compartment, there are three major types of canonical degradative autophagy.These types are: microautophagy/endosomal microautophagy, chaperone mediated autophagy,and macroautophagy, the last one being characterized by the engulfment of cytoplasmic contentsby a double membrane vesicle, named autophagosome. However, other non-canonical types ofautophagy have been described. One of these unconventional forms is named secretory autophagy,a newly recognized process that is becoming of increasing relevance to explain the non-canonicalsecretion of a series of cytosolic proteins that have critical biological importance.