Autophagy - From Molecular Mechanisms to Flux Control in Health and Disease: (Learning Materials in Biosciences)

This textbook describes the autophagy pathway with all its key molecular mechanisms and its physiological functions from yeast to eukaryotes in a didactic and reader-friendly manner. It provides the most critical aspects that need to be understood to foster research and clinical translation in this area. Autophagy activity, mechanism and control in the context of cellular fate are central to this book, underpinned by human pathologies of priority. Further, key chapters describing major techniques required to assess autophagy activity, and highlighting starting points for the research of potential drug candidates and clinical translation, offer detailed insight into practice and application. The work represents a comprehensive study guide that allows undergraduate and postgraduate students in biology and biomedicine to rapidly engage with the most critical and recent aspects of autophagy in health and its control of disease. Written in a style that may be favourable for its use in the classroom, this book can also serve as a valuable source for teaching in the biomedical and medical sciences.

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1. How to Learn, and Teach, Autophagy.- Chapter 2. Discerning autophagy pathway intermediates – transmission electron microscopy techniques.- Chapter 3. Assessment of Autophagy: Correlative and Super-Resolution Microscopy Techniques.- Chapter 4. Autophagy receptors couple cargo destined to be degraded with the core autophagy machinery.- Chapter 5. The source of membrane during autophagy and the early steps in autophagosome formation.- Chapter 6. Autophagy and neurodegenerative diseases.- Chapter 7. Autophagy and intracellular membrane dynamics in aging and age-related diseases.- Chapter 8. Shear stress-dependent regulation of autophagy and metabolism in kidney epithelial cells.- Chapter 9. Autophagy assessment in diagnostic pathology: Focus on skeletal myopathies.- Chapter 10. The role of autophagy and mitophagy in cardiomyocyte ischemic injury.- Chapter 11. Chaperone-mediated autophagy in health and disease.- Chapter 12. A phenotypic screening routine for the identification of autophagic flux inducers.

About the Author :
Ben Loos, Ph.D., is Professor in Physiological Sciences, Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Over the last 15 years his work has sought to better understand the role of autophagy activity, i.e. autophagic flux, in cell death onset in neurodegenerative disease and gliomas, to better quantify and control autophagy function, so as to govern cell death decision making. He focuses on the utilization of various microscopy techniques, to allow single cell and tissue analysis with high localization precision and quantitative power across scale and modality. Daniel Klionsky, PhD, is a Research Professor and Alexander G. Ruthven Professor in the Life Sciences and the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Michigan, USA. In 2003, he received the National Science Foundation Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars, in 2009, was elected a Fellow of the AAAS, was named a Thompson Reuters Citation Laureate in 2013, was awarded the University of Utrecht van Deenen Medal in 2015 and became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019. Dr. Klionsky's lab studies the mechanism and regulation of autophagy in yeast.