Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved vacuolar process functioning in the degradation of cellular components for reuse. In plants, autophagy is generally activated upon stress and its regulation is executed by numbers of AuTophaGy-related genes (ATGs), of which the ATG8 plays a dual role in both biogenesis of autophagosomes and recruitment of ATG8-interacting motif (AIM) anchored selective autophagy receptors (SARs). Such motif is either termed as AIM or ubiquitin-interacting motif (UIM), corresponding to the LC3-interacting region (LIR)/AIM docking site (LDS) or the UIM docking site (UDS) of ATG8, respectively. To date, dozens of AIM or UIM containing SARs have been characterized. However, the knowledge of these motifs is still obscured. In this review, we intend to summarize the current understanding of SAR proteins and discuss the conservation and diversification of the AIMs/UIMs, expectantly providing new insights into the evolution of them in various biological processes in plants.

Autophagy is a highly conserved degradation mechanism in eukaryotes, executing the breakdown of unwanted cell components and subsequent recycling of cellular material for stress relief through vacuole-dependence in plants and yeast while it is lysosome-dependent in animal manner. Upon stress, different types of autophagy are stimulated to operate certain biological processes by employing specific selective autophagy receptors (SARs), which hijack the cargo proteins or organelles to the autophagy machinery for subsequent destruction in the vacuole/lysosome. Despite recent advances in autophagy, the conserved and diversified mechanism of autophagy in response to various stresses between plants and animals still remain a mystery. In this review, we intend to summarize and discuss the characterization of the SARs and their corresponding processes, expectantly advancing the scope and perspective of the evolutionary fate of autophagy between plants and animals.