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Kalita et al. Neuroimmunol Neuroinflammation 2018;5:16 Neuroimmunology
DOI: 10.20517/2347-8659.2018.22 and Neuroinflammation

Commentary Open Access

Customized autophagy: a long way to go

Jayantee Kalita, Usha Kant Misra, Alok Kumar

Department of Neurology, Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences, Uttar Pradesh 226014, India.

Correspondence to: Prof. Jayantee Kalita, Department of Neurology, Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences,
Raebarli Road Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh 226014, India. E-mail: jayanteek@yahoo.com, jkalita@sgpgi.ac.in
How to cite this article: Kalita J, Misra UK, Kumar A. Customized autophagy: a long way to go. Neuroimmunol Neuroinflammation
2018;5:16. http://dx.doi.org/10.20517/2347-8659.2018.22
Received: 19 Apr 2018 Accepted: 20 Apr 2018 Published: 7 May 2018

Science Editor: Athanassios P. Kyritsis Copy Editor: Guang-Zhe Zhu Production Editor: Cai-Hong Wang

The survival of any eukaryotic cell may have a unified theory i.e., energy production and clearance of
unwanted organelles or pathogens which may be biological or non-biological. Survival of species over time
depends not only on survival of cell but also on its ability to replicate and produce progeny. For these
functions, intricate genetic, immunological responses including innate and adaptive immunity and congenial
environment are needed. Autophagy is one of such mechanism and considered as a housekeeping system of
a eukaryotic cell. Takeshige et al. in 1990’s first time elucidated the underlying mechanism for “autophagy”
[1]
in yeast and showed that same type of fundamental mechanism is used by cells for degrading and recycling
cellular components for which the group leader Yoshinori Ohsumi has been awarded Nobel prize in 2016. In
last three decades, the role of autophagy has been extensively studied to understand the pathophysiology and
to derive possible treatment options in both acute and chronic neurological diseases such as stroke, trauma,
Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis etc. . Recently, the role of autophagy
[2-4]
has been evaluated in neuroinfectious diseases especially to understand reactivation of latent virus ,
[5]
persistence and replication of RNA virus , immune enhancement leading to severe disease manifestations
[6]
and survival of pathogenic organism against a hostile antibiotic treatment evading its action leading to drug
resistance . This review article by Sahu and Ter has reviewed the role of autophagy in central nervous
[8]
[7]
system (CNS) infection.
Amongst the different types of autophagy, macroautophagy is the most extensively studied and well
characterized [9,10] . The role of micro-autophagy, chaperon mediated autophagy and xenophagy in central
nervous system infections yet to be evaluated for bed side application. The immune regulation in CNS is
quite different from systemic immune regulation. CNS mostly depends on microglial mediated immune
regulation in presence of normal blood brain barrier and blood-cerebrospinal fluid barrier. However, CNS
may suffer from double crash immune dysregulation in presence of CNS infection due to haematogenous

© The Author(s) 2018. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use,
sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, for any purpose, even commercially, as long
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