Paper published in Nature_November 2014

Autophagy — the process in which a cell digests its own components in organelles known as lysosomes — comes in various forms. A basic form involves recycling nutrients upon starvation to maintain cellular homeostasis, so it is not surprising, that the signalling mediators of nutrient sensing can modulate autophagy in the short-term. We now show that starvation-induced autophagy can also be regulated through long-term transcriptional control. We unveiled a molecular mechanism of how two different nutrient-sensing nuclear recpetors PPARα and FXR coordinate autophagy with opposite transcriptional outputs in a paper published in Nature on the issue of November 12th, 2014 (Nature 516, 112-115).