Abstract  Autophagy is a highly regulated and multistep biological process whereby cells under metabolic, proteotoxic, or other stresses remove dysfunctional organelles and/or misfolded/polyubiquitinated proteins by shuttling them via specialized structures called autophagosomes to the lysosome for degradation. Although autophagy is generally considered to be a non-selective process, accumulating evidence suggests that it can also selectively degrade specific target cargoes. These selective targets include proteins, mitochondria, and even invading bacteria. The discovery and characterization of autophagic adapters, such as p62/Sequestosome 1 (SQSTM1) and Neighbor of BRCA1 gene 1 (NBR1), have provided mechanistic insights into selective autophagy. These receptors are all able to act as cargo receptors for the degradation of ubiquitinated substrates. This review mainly summarizes the most up-to-date findings regarding the key receptor proteins that play important roles in regulating selective autophagy.

Keywords   autophagy; selective; receptor proteins

Received   2015-1-5　　
Accepted  2015-3-30

Funding  This work was supported by the grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81372182), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2012T50712), the Hunan Provincial Innovation Foundation for Postgraduate (No. 71380100003), and the

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