Selective autophagy

Autophagy can be a selective process where specific cargo (organelles/proteins) are targetted to degradation in the lysosome. In general, selective autophagy is initiated when a cellular signal tags the cargo organelle for degradation. Subsequently, cargo recognition proteins detect and recruit the organelle to interact directly or indirectly with Atg proteins forming the phagophore. The next steps involve formation of the autophagosome and fusion with the lysosome for degradation. Depending upon the organelle, different molecules are used to for the autophagy mechanism (Andling AL et al. 2017). Consequently, the different mechanisms are known by the organelle degraded such as mitophagy for mitochondia, lipophagy for lipid droplets, pexophagy for peroxisomes and aggrephagy for aggregated proteins.

Summary from Reactome (R-HSA-9663891), read 2026-09-23.