Figure 1.

Overview of the genomic instability caused by autophagy impairment. Autophagy impairment leads to the accumulation of hazardous cellular components, such as dysfunctional mitochondria and toxic protein aggregates, which leads to an increase in ROS production (box i), cell cycle dynamic alterations, DNA damage and, consequently, genomic instability. Autophagy impairment also interferes with DNA repair (box ii) and removal of micronuclei (here referred to as nucleophagy (box iii), contributing to genomic instability. The molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in the role of mitophagy in the context of DNA damage are shown in Figure 2. Pathways that are involved in the crosstalk between DDR and autophagy are summarized in Figure 3 and Table 1, whereas the dual role of DDR-induced autophagy is shown on Figure 4 and Table 2