Cross-Talk Between Autophagy and Death Receptor Signaling Pathways

Autophagy (a Greek term meaning self-digestion) and apoptosis (a Greek term meaning “falling off”) constitute two distinct evolutionarily conserved processes that are involved in tissue homeostasis in metazoans. Dysfunction of one of both processes can result in development of human pathologies including cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, or inflammatory-related diseases. Autophagy and apoptosis share several signaling pathways and can mutually regulate each other to ensure cellular homeostasis in response to a given stress signal. Although autophagy has been often considered as a survival mechanism, a body of evidence reveals that autophagy can contribute to both caspase-dependent and caspase-independent programmed cell death. In this chapter, we summarize our current understanding of the molecular interplay between autophagy and death receptor signaling pathways and discuss how autophagy and autophagy-regulatory proteins can control receptor-mediated cell death signaling.