Interaction of the autophagosomal SNARE Syntaxin 17 (Syx17) with the homotypic fusion and vacuole protein–sorting (HOPS) tethering complex is necessary for the fusion of autophagosomes with lysosomes. HOPS, but not Syx17, is also required for endocytic degradation and biosynthetic transport to lysosomes and eye pigment granules.
Levels of the selective autophagy substrate p62 have been established in recent years as a specific readout for basal autophagic activity. Here we compared different experimental approaches for using this assay in Drosophila larvae. Similar to the more commonly used western blots, quantifying p62 dots in immunostained fat body cells of L3 stage larvae detected a strong accumulation of endogenous p62 aggregates in null mutants for Atg genes and S6K. Importantly, genes whose mutation or silencing results in early stage lethality can only be analyzed by microscopy using clonal analysis. The loss of numerous general housekeeping genes show a phenotype in large-scale screens including autophagy, and the p62 assay was potentially suitable for distinguishing bona fide autophagy regulators from silencing of a DNA polymerase subunit or a ribosomal gene that likely has a non-specific effect on autophagy. p62 accumulation upon RNAi silencing of known autophagy regulators was dependent on the duration of the knockdown effect, unlike in the case of starvation-induced autophagy. The endogenous p62 assay was more sensitive than a constitutively overexpressed p62-GFP reporter, which showed self-aggregation and large-scale accumulation even in control cells. We recommend western blots for following the conversion of overexpressed p62-GFP reporters to estimate autophagic activity if sample collection from mutant larvae or adults is possible. In addition, we also showed that overexpressed p62 or Atg8 reporters can strongly influence the phenotypes of each other, potentially giving rise to false or contradicting results. Overexpressed p62 aggregates also incorporated Atg8 reporter molecules that might lead to a wrong conclusion of strongly enhanced autophagy, whereas expression of an Atg8 reporter transgene rescued the inhibitory effect of a dominant-negative Atg4 mutant on basal and starvation-induced autophagy.
The endocytic Rab5 effectors Ccz1-Mon1 complex and Rab7 promote autophagosome-lysosome fusion independent of Rab5, which facilitates a later step of autophagy: degradation of cargo within lysosomes.
Rab7 promotes fusion of autophagosomes and late endosomes with lysosomes. Lőrincz et al. show that Rab2 is critical for the delivery of autophagic and endocytic cargo to lysosomes and for their degradation, and that it promotes autophagosome–lysosome fusion. The results suggest Rab2 and Rab7 coordinately promote autophagic and endosomal degradation and lysosome function.
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