The interplay between pathogens and Atg8 family proteins: thousand‐faced interactions

Abstract

Autophagy is an intracellular degradation and recycling process that can also remove pathogenic intracellular bacteria and viruses from within cells (referred to as xenophagy) and activate the adaptive immune responses. But autophagy—especially Atg proteins including Atg8 family members—can also have proviral and probacterial effects. In this review, we summarize known interactions of bacterial, parasitic, and viral proteins with Atg8 family proteins and the outcome of these interactions on pathogen replication, autophagy, or mitophagy. We discuss the value of prediction software and the research methodology in the study of pathogen protein‐Atg8 family protein interactions, with selected examples of potential LC3‐interacting region motif‐containing SARS‐CoV‐2 proteins.

Identification and Expression Analysis of the Solanum tuberosum StATG8 Family Associated with the WRKY Transcription Factor

“…Plant autophagy research is focused on the function in the cytoplasm where selective autophagy works [ 11 ]. However, recent studies have shown that ATG8 interacts with various proteins in the nucleus [ 74 , 75 ]. Pathogen proteins might affect autophagy activity through ATG8 interaction in the nucleus.…”

LIRcentral: a manually curated online database of experimentally validated functional LIR-motifs

“…The copyright holder for this preprint this version posted June 25, 2022. ; https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.06. 21.496832 doi: bioRxiv preprint underlying several subtypes of selective autophagy and related biological processes [18], and the number of scientific publications reporting the experimental validation of functional LIR-motifs continues to accumulate. Despite the importance of experimentally verified LIR-motifs, for wet lab biologists and computational biologists alike, there is a lack of a central repository of LIRmotif instances curated from the literature describing such sequences across species.…”

“…The collection of a few dozen experimentally characterized LIR-motifs made it possible to develop computational methods for their prediction [16, 17]. Such prediction tools have inevitably facilitated the advancement of research towards identifying the molecular mechanisms underlying several subtypes of selective autophagy and related biological processes [18], and the number of scientific publications reporting the experimental validation of functional LIR-motifs continues to accumulate. Despite the importance of experimentally verified LIR-motifs, for wet lab biologists and computational biologists alike, there is a lack of a central repository of LIR-motif instances curated from the literature describing such sequences across species.…”