Autophagy is one of the two major degradation pathways of eukaryotic cells and recently gained a lot of attention due to 2016’s Nobel Laurate in Physiology or Medicine Yoshinori Ohsumi for his contributions in understanding its mechanisms. The word autophagy originates from the Greek words auto- = “self” and phagein = “to eat”, thus meaning “self eating”. Autophagy plays an important role in neuronal homeostasis and a decline in autophagy activity is correlated with aging as its impairment is also implicated in many neurological disorders.

My research aims to unravel how a decline of autophagy contributes to “neuronal aging” and how impairment of autophagy would affect different neuronal subtypes and what this would imply in the context of neurological disorders targeting specific neuronal subpopulations.