title: Autophagy, immunity and human disease.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To give an overview of autophagy and its effects on innate and adaptive immunity and touch on some of the roles of autophagy in disease.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Precise regulation of autophagy is necessary to maintain metabolic equilibrium, immune homeostasis, delineate cell fate and influence host cell responses to cytosolic pathogens. A growing number of studies have implicated that inactivation of autophagy-selective responses contributes to inflammatory disorders, neurodegeneration and cancer, but the precise steps at which disease-associated autophagy-related (ATG) genes affect autophagy pathways is unknown at present.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In eukaryotic cells autophagy is constitutively active at low levels, whereas significant up-regulation occurs in response to a multitude of stresses. Autophagy has achieved notoriety as a perturbed biological process in many disease states and an exponential increase of studies attribute roles for autophagy in innate and adaptive immunity. Understanding how individual disease-associated ATG genes function will lead to a better understanding of and potentially novel therapies for treating the diseases in which they are involved.
authors.affiliation: Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, USA.
authors.forename: Robert J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Heath
authors.forename: Ramnik J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Xavier
mesh_terms: D000220:Adaptation, Biological; D000818:Animals; D017951:Antigen Presentation / Q000276:immunology; D001343:Autophagy / Q000235:genetics / Q000276:immunology*; D000071183:Autophagy-Related Proteins; D002352:Carrier Proteins / Q000276:immunology; D003424:Crohn Disease / Q000276:immunology*; D019610:Cytoprotection / Q000276:immunology; D005057:Eukaryotic Cells / Q000166:cytology; D019204:GTP-Binding Proteins / Q000276:immunology; D006706:Homeostasis / Q000276:immunology; D006801:Humans; D007113:Immunity, Innate / Q000276:immunology*
chemical_list: C518959:ATG16L1 protein, human; D000071183:Autophagy-Related Proteins; D002352:Carrier Proteins; D019204:GTP-Binding Proteins; C513539:IRGM protein, human