Monitoring Autophagy During Drosophila Oogenesis

Macroautophagy (autophagy hereafter) is an evolutionarily conserved mechanism that maintains the health of cells by degrading toxic proteins and damaged organelles within the lysosomes. Tissues like ovary are made up of heterogeneous cell types and each cell type has distinct levels of autophagy. Studying autophagy in a cell-type specific manner helps better understand the role of autophagy during oogenesis. Here, we describe assays for monitoring autophagy during oogenesis in Drosophila using the two protein markers, Atg8a and Ref(2)P.