“…Within the retina, although some studies reported that autophagy mostly acts between the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) and the choroid Bruch's membrane (Blasiak et al, 2014;Kaarniranta et al, 2020;Sethna et al, 2021), other studies indicate the relevance of autophagy between the RPE and photoreceptors (Pinelli et al, 2020c;Kim et al, 2021;Shijo et al, 2021;Wu et al, 2021). The occurrence of retinal degeneration is postulated to derive from focal subcellular autophagy impairment at various retinal levels (Pinelli et al, 2020c), and it may serves to distinguish between different phenotypes of retinal degeneration (Pinelli et al, 2020c;Kim et al, 2021;Shijo et al, 2021;Wu et al, 2021). In fact, according to the hypothesis of an exosome-dependent trafficking of misfolded proteins towards different poles of the retina, as inferred by pre-clinical studies (Pinelli et al, 2020c;2021a;2021b), various autophagy-mediated pathogenic mechanisms within the retina may be implicated.…”