Skip to main content
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2011 Apr 2.
Published in final edited form as: FEBS Lett. 2010 Feb 8;584(7):1359–1366. doi: 10.1016/j.febslet.2010.02.013

Figure 1. Three main types of autophagy.

Figure 1

There are three main types of autophagy: chaperone-mediated autophagy, microautophagy, and macroautophagy. The schematic depicts a mixture of these processes in lower and higher eukaryotes. For example, the lysosome is much smaller than the fungal vacuole. Also, chaperone-mediated autophagy has only been characterized in higher eukaryotes, whereas microautophagy and macroautophagy are evolutionarily conserved. Macroautophagy is the best-characterized pathway out of the three and the hallmark of this process is the formation of a double-membrane vesicle that non-selectively sequesters cytoplasmic components and delivers them to the lysosome or vacuole for degradation and recycling of the cargo.