Recent Developments and Emerging Trends in Macroautophagy

Dear Colleagues,

Macroautophagy is a programmed catabolic process involved in lysosomal-mediated degradation of cellular constituents. In response to diverse cellular stresses and environmental insults, macroautophagy is markedly induced to degrade various cellular components and organelles ranging from aggregated proteins, lipid droplets, and glycogen to damaged organelles and infected bacteria. Owing to its essential roles in cellular homeostasis and host defense, macroautophagy defects are tightly linked to a broad range of human conditions such as pathogen invasions; muscle, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases; cancers, metabolic disorders; and aging. The intrinsic human relevance of macroautophagy leads to the intensive development of small molecules, reagents, and protocols to modulate or manipulate autophagic activities, which have a significant potential to prevent or treat diverse diseases.

This Special Issue aims to summarize the current understanding on the pivotal role that maintaining a proper autophagic activity plays in healthy and physiologic conditions and how its malfunctions could be detrimental to the levels of cell, tissue, organ, and even organism.

For this Special Issue, we encourage the submission of research articles and review articles that investigate aspects relevant to physiological and pathological autophagic events, including new therapeutic approaches and methods measuring the different forms of autophagy.

Additional topics include but are not limited to tissue homeostasis, metabolism, crosstalk between autophagy and other signaling pathways, proliferation, differentiation, and selective forms of autophagy.

We look forward to your contributions.

Assoc. Prof. Jae Man Lee

Guest Editor

Manuscripts should be submitted via our online editorial system at https://imr.propub.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to start your submission. Manuscripts can be submitted now or up until the deadline. All papers will go through peer-review process. Accepted papers will be published in the journal (as soon as accepted) and meanwhile listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, reviews as well as short communications are preferred. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office to announce on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts will be thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. Please visit the Instruction for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) in this open access journal is 2500 USD. Submitted manuscripts should be well formatted in good English.