Snapshot of the network

摘要

Autophagy is an essential cellular process for protein and organelle quality control. Analyses of proteins that interact with the human autophagic machinery provide an outline of the molecular organization of this pathway.rnTo survive, cells must get rid of damaged, obsolete or dangerous components. They do so by the process of autophagy, which involves a series of dynamic membrane-rearrangement reactions mediated by a core set of proteins -the Atg proteins'. Up to now, these proteins have largely been analysed in the context of discrete macromolecular complexes that function at specific steps in the autophagy pathway. In this issue, Behrends et al.2 (page 68) report a tour de force of proteomic analysis that has identified human proteins that interact with the core autophagic machinery and related molecules.