Beginning to understand autophagy, an intracellular self- degradation system in plants

Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved intracellular pro-cess for the vacuolar degradation of cytoplasmic compo-nents. There is no doubt that autophagy is very important to plant life, especially because plants are immobile and must survive in environmental extremes. Early studies of autophagy provided our first insights into the structural characteristics of the process in plants, but for a long time the molecular mechanisms and the physiological roles of autophagy were not understood. Genetic analyses of autop-hagy in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae have greatly ex-panded our knowledge of the molecular aspects of autophagy in plants as well as in animals. Until recently our knowledge of plant autophagy was in its infancy com-pared with autophagy research in yeast and animals, but recent efforts by plant researchers have made many ad-vances in our understanding of plant autophagy. Here I will introduce an overview of autophagy in plants, present current findings and discuss the physiological roles of self-degradation