TY - JOUR T1 - Septins are involved at the early stages of macroautophagy JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/043133 SP - 043133 AU - Gaurav Barve AU - Shreyas Sridhar AU - Amol Aher AU - Sunaina Singh AU - Lakshmeesha K. N. AU - Ravi Manjithaya Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/03/10/043133.abstract N2 - Autophagy is a conserved cellular degradation pathway where in a double membrane vesicle, called as an autophagosome captures long lived proteins, damaged or superfluous organelles and delivers to lysosome for degradation8. We have identified a novel role for septins in autophagy. Septins are GTP binding proteins that localize at the bud-neck and are involved in cytokinesis in budding yeast. We show that septins under autophagy prevalent conditions are majorly localized to the cytoplasm in the form of punctate structures and one of the punctum co-localized with the autophagy protein, Atg8 in WT strain and multiple puncta of septins co-localized with multiple Atg8 puncta in a ypt7Δ strain. Interestingly, the septins also formed small non-canonical rings which were different from the canonical bud-neck rings and these non-canonical rings also co-localized with Atg8 during autophagy. Furthermore, we observed that in one of the septin Ts- mutant, cdc10-5, the anterograde trafficking of Atg9 was affected at non-permissive temperature (NPT). All these results suggest a role of septins in early stages of autophagy during autophagosome formation. ER -