Autophagy: Eat Yourself to Live

Autophagy is a metabolic process of consumption of the body's own tissues occurring in starvation and certain diseases. The field of autophagy has grown enormously over the past 10-15 years, with rapid advances in our understanding of the regulatory mechanisms that control autophagy pathways in mammalian systems. It has also improved our understanding of the physiological influences of autophagy in health and disease. It all started in the mid1950s when Sam Clark Jr. of the School of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis looked through his electron microscope at newborn mouse kidneys and used the term cytolysome for the membrane-bound structures within the cytoplasm of the kidney cells. He and his colleague Edward Essner wrote in 1962 that “Within these cytolysomes remarkable events are in progress”, “Cytoplasm has somehow found its way inside the droplets and is apparently in the process of digestion.” These were the first descriptions of what is known today as macro autophagy and now referred to as autophagy. JMS 2016; 19(2):46