History and Current Status of Autophagy Research

Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved process in which eukaryotic bilayer membrane vesicles enclose intracellular contents and transport them to lysosomes for degradation. In the 1990s, Ohsumi et al. identified multiple autophagy-related genes in a yeast model. Functional homologues of almost all yeast autophagy-related genes were found in higher eukaryotes. In 2003, Klionsky et al. named these genes the Atg genes and studied the interactions between the proteins they encoded and their functions in autophagy. In April 2005, a new journal, Autophagy, was published that was edited by Klionsky. The number of autophagy research papers indexed by PubMed has increased each year. In 2016, Yoshinori Ohsumi won the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for his discovery of the autophagy mechanism. Autophagy has thus become a hot research area, which involves biology, medicine, botany and microbiology. Many researchers are actively exploring the relationship between non-selective and selective autophagy and various pathophysiological states in humans, and are studying the molecular mechanisms underlying autophagy regulation in various biological conditions, including cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular diseases, immune responses, development and ageing. This chapter focuses on the history and current status of autophagy research and highlights the milestones that contributed to the development of the field.