{"doi":"10.3389/978-2-88971-339-4","title":"Autophagy in Mammalian Development and Differentiation","abstract":"It has been known for many decades that autophagy, a conserved lysosomal degradation pathway, is highly active during differentiation and development.However, until the discovery of the autophagy-related (ATG) genes in the 1990s, the functional significance of this activity was unknown.Initially, genetic knockout studies of ATG genes in lower eukaryotes revealed an essential role for the autophagy pathway in differentiation and development.In recent years, the analyses of systemic and tissue-specific knockout models of ATG genes in mice has led to an explosion of knowledge about the functions of autophagy in mammalian development and differentiation.Here we review the main advances in our understanding of these functions.Autophagy is a process by which cytoplasmic components including macromolecules (for example proteins, glycogens, lipids and nucleotides) and organelles (for example mitochondria, peroxisomes and endoplasmic reticulum) are degraded by the lysosome (Fig. 1a) 1,2 .There are at least three different types of autophagy; macroautophagy (delivery of cytosolic contents to the lysosome by autophagosomes), microautophagy (inward invagination of the lysosomal membrane) and chaperone-mediated autophagy (direct translocation across the lysosomal membrane).Among these, macroautophagy (hereafter referred to as autophagy) has been the most extensively studied.Yeast genetic studies identified a set of autophagy-related (ATG) genes that are required for macroautophagy and its related processes.These genes are highly conserved among eukaryotes, allowing analyses of the roles of autophagy using reverse genetic techniques (Tables 123).Such analyses have revealed various physiological roles and pathological effects of autophagy, including adaptive responses to starvation, quality control of intracellular proteins and organelles, antiaging, suppression of tumour formation, elimination of intracellular microbes, and antigen presentation [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] .Beyond these links to physiology, there is also increasing evidence that autophagy has conserved roles in differentiation and development.As a dynamic and highly inducible catabolic process that responds to environmental and hormonal cues, the autophagy pathway can drive the rapid cellular changes necessary for proper differentiation and/or development.","journal":"Frontiers research topics","year":2021,"id":212514,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.953,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[],"reference_count":93,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:52:27.434608Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}