AUTOPHAGY - AN IMPORTANT IMMUNOLOGICAL PHENOMENON

作者：Niedzwiedzka Rystwej Paulina^*; Deptula Wieslaw

来源：Postepy Biologii Komorki, 2009, 36(3): 455-464.

• autophagy
• innate and adaptive immunity

The paper describes an important biological process, i.e. autophagy - a conservative and phylogenetically old mechanism, which role is to eliminate damaged and (or) used parts of cell, in order to avoid a complete degradation of it. The process of autophagy, being one of four basic mechanisms of cell death, demands different genes and factors to run correctly. Within autophagy one may distinguish macroautophagy, microautophagy, specific autophagy and chaperone-dependent autophagy. Macrophagy relies on eliminating elements from the cell by forming autophagosome, microautophagy is a process of digesting smaller parts of the cell directly by the fusion with lysosome, specific autophagy takes place only in peroxysomes and chaperone-dependent autophagy is held only in the presence of heat-shock proteins (hsp). Autophagy plays a crucial role in innate and adaptive immunity. The participation of this process is registered in bacterial and viral infections, where TLR receptors are involved. Moreover, autophagy participates in physiology, for example stress and round-labour period and in pathology, like cancer, liver damage, muscle and nervous system dysfunction and Crohn's disease.

• 出版日期2009