Autophagy, immunity and human disease

Purpose of review To give an overview of autophagy and its effects on innate and adaptive immunity and touch on some of the roles of autophagy in disease. Recent findings Precise regulation of autophagy is necessary to maintain metabolic equilibrium, immune homeostasis, delineate cell fate and influence host cell responses to cytosolic pathogens. A growing number of studies have implicated that inactivation of autophagy-selective responses contributes to inflammatory disorders, neurodegeneration and cancer, but the precise steps at which disease-associated autophagy-related (ATG) genes affect autophagy pathways is unknown at present. Summary In eukaryotic cells autophagy is constitutively active at low levels, whereas significant up-regulation occurs in response to a multitude of stresses. Autophagy has achieved notoriety as a perturbed biological process in many disease states and an exponential increase of studies attribute roles for autophagy in innate and adaptive immunity. Understanding how individual disease-associated ATG genes function will lead to a better understanding of and potentially novel therapies for treating the diseases in which they are involved.