Role of autophagy in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved intracellular catabolic system. During Caenorhabditis elegans development, autophagy plays an important role in many physiological processes, including survival under starvation conditions, modulation of life span, and regulation of necrotic cell death caused by toxic ion-channel variants. Recently, it has been demonstrated that during embryogenesis, basal levels of autophagy selectively remove a group of proteins in somatic cells, including the aggregate-prone components of germline P granules. Degradation of these protein aggregates provides a genetic model to identify essential autophagy components and also to elucidate how the autophagic machinery selectively recognizes and degrades specific targets during animal development.