Autophagy: A self degradation system in plants

Autophagy is a self-eating process mostly found in eukaryotic cells that experience certain stresses. Cell material is broken down to supply the building blocks in autophagic process which is needed to maintain essential processes in plants. It plays an important role in the cell survival and in triggering cell death. It is an important self-degradation system that maintains the normal functioning of crop plants. Autophagy served as a primitive immune defence in response to cell starvation. It can precisely degraded the damaged organelles and pathogenic inclusions. Macroautophagy is considered as the major type of selective autophagy. Protein complexes undergo degradation inside the vacuoles and makes cargo that forms the autophagic body which is quickly degraded by the action of proteases, lipases and nucleases. Autophagosome formation around cytoplasmic components delivers cargo to the vacuole for degradation. Autophagy also regulates programmed cell death in plants that is involved in protecting them from viral and microbial pathogens. Autophagy-related genes has been identified as an important milestones in recognition the mechanism of autophagy and they also have been identified in several crop species particularly in major crops such as rice, wheat and maize.Autophagy plays an important role in recycling of intracellular components and regulating plant survival and stress response.