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Cells
Special Issues
Role of Autophagy in Plant Cells
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Role of Autophagy in Plant Cells

A special issue of Cells (ISSN 2073-4409). This special issue belongs to the section "Plant, Algae and Fungi Cell Biology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 July 2025 | Viewed by 1985

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Alessio Papini

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Department of Biology, University of Florence, Via Micheli 3, 50121 Florence, Italy
Interests: plant cell biology; autophagy; programmed cell death; plant anatomy
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Stress causes organisms to modify their structure and their molecular equipment to adapt to the environment. Besides phenotypical changes, environmental stress can also increase the fitness of well-adapted individuals and consequently change the population’s genetic pool. One of the main defenses used by organisms to resist several types of stress at the cellular level is autophagy, since this general process is necessary to recover damaged biomolecules and entire organelles.

Environmental stress induces particularly evident autophagic effects in plants, but the focus of this Special Issue is other groups of eukaryotes.

Prof. Dr. Alessio Papini
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cells is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • autophagy
  • endoplasmic reticulum
  • TOR
  • vacuoles
  • lysosomes
  • mitochondria
  • plastids

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

27 pages, 12664 KiB  
Article
Genotype-Specific Activation of Autophagy during Heat Wave in Wheat
by Kathleen Hickey, Yunus Şahin, Glenn Turner, Taras Nazarov, Vadim Jitkov, Mike Pumphrey and Andrei Smertenko
Cells 2024, 13(14), 1226; https://doi.org/10.3390/cells13141226 - 20 Jul 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1237
Abstract
Recycling of unnecessary or dysfunctional cellular structures through autophagy plays a critical role in cellular homeostasis and environmental resilience. Therefore, the autophagy trait may have been unintentionally selected in wheat breeding programs for higher yields in arid climates. This hypothesis was tested by [...] Read more.
Recycling of unnecessary or dysfunctional cellular structures through autophagy plays a critical role in cellular homeostasis and environmental resilience. Therefore, the autophagy trait may have been unintentionally selected in wheat breeding programs for higher yields in arid climates. This hypothesis was tested by measuring the response of three common autophagy markers, ATG7, ATG8, and NBR1, to a heat wave under reduced soil moisture content in 16 genetically diverse spring wheat landraces originating from different geographical locations. We observed in the greenhouse trials that ATG8 and NBR1 exhibited genotype-specific responses to a 1 h, 40 °C heat wave, while ATG7 did not show a consistent response. Three genotypes from Uruguay, Mozambique, and Afghanistan showed a pattern consistent with higher autophagic activity: decreased or stable abundance of both ATG8 and NBR1 proteins, coupled with increased transcription of ATG8 and NBR1. In contrast, three genotypes from Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Egypt exhibited elevated ATG8 protein levels alongside reduced or unaltered ATG8 transcript levels, indicating a potential suppression or no change in autophagic activity. Principal component analysis demonstrated a correlation between lower abundance of ATG8 and NBR1 proteins and higher yield in the field trials. We found that (i) the combination of heat and drought activated autophagy only in several genotypes, suggesting that despite being a resilience mechanism, autophagy is a heat-sensitive process; (ii) higher autophagic activity correlates positively with greater yield; (iii) the lack of autophagic activity in some high-yielding genotypes suggests contribution of alternative stress-resilient mechanisms; and (iv) enhanced autophagic activity in response to heat and drought was independently selected by wheat breeding programs in different geographic locations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Role of Autophagy in Plant Cells)
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