Stochastics of degradation: the autophagic-lysosomal system of the cell

Abstract

Autophagy is a conservative and evolutionarily ancient process that provides transfer of various cellular substances, organelles and potentially dangerous cellular components to the lysosome for their degradation. This process is crucial for the recycling of energy and substrates, which are required for the cellular biosynthesis. Autophagy plays a major role not only in the survival of cells under stress conditions, but also is actively involved in maintaining of cellular homeostasis. It has multiple effects on immune system and cellular remodeling during organism development. The effectiveness of autophagy is ensured by the tightly managed interaction of two organelles autophagosomes and lysosomes. Despite significant progress in description of molecular mechanisms underlying in autophagolysosomal system (ALS) functioning, many fundamental questions are still open. Namely, specialized functions of lysosomes and role of ALS in pathogenesis of human diseases are still enigmatic. Knowledge about mechanisms of subsequent stages of autophagolysosomal degradation, from the initiation of autophagy to the terminal stage of substrate destruction in the lysosome, may generate new approaches in order to orchestrate ALS and therefore selectively control cellular proteostasis.