How Oncogenic Viruses Exploit p62-Mediated Selective Autophagy for Cancer Development.

The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Dr. Yoshinori Ohsumi for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy. Autophagy is a fundamental and conserved cellular program essential for maintaining cellular homeostasis. Unlike non-selective autophagy (including mitophagy) that sorts harmful or surplus cellular contents to the lysosomes for degradation and recycling, selective autophagy is mediated by an increasing pool of receptors, such as p62, NBR1, TAX1BP1, NDP52, OPTN, BCL2L13, FUNDC1, CCDC50, TRIMs, and TOLLIP, and is generally invoked by certain stresses to specifically target functional substrates for lysosomal degradation to modulate various cellular responses [14].