Chaperone-mediated autophagy: a gatekeeper of neuronal proteostasis

Research output: Contribution to journalComment/debatepeer-review

23 Scopus citations

Abstract

Different types of autophagy co-exist in all mammalian cells, however, the specific contribution of each of these autophagic pathways to the maintenance of cellular proteostasis and cellular function remains unknown. In this work, we have investigated the consequences of failure of chaperone-mediated autophagy (CMA) in neurons and compared the impact, on the neuronal proteome, of CMA loss to that of macroautophagy loss. We found that these autophagic pathways are non-redundant and that CMA is the main one responsible for maintenance of the metastable proteome (the one at risk of aggregation). We demonstrate that loss of CMA, as the one that occurs in aging, has a synergistic effect with the proteotoxicity associated with neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer disease (AD) and, conversely, that, pharmacological enhancement of CMA is effective in improving both behavior and pathology in two different AD mouse models.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)2040-2042
Number of pages3
JournalAutophagy
Volume17
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021

Keywords

  • Alzheimer disease
  • chaperones
  • chemical activators of autophagy
  • lysosomes
  • metastable proteome
  • neurodegeneration
  • protein aggregation
  • proteostasis
  • tau
  • tauopathies

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Molecular Biology
  • Cell Biology

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Chaperone-mediated autophagy: a gatekeeper of neuronal proteostasis'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this