Methods for studying autophagy within the tumor microenvironment

Abstract

Defective autophagy has been linked with many pathologies, including cancer, diabetes, infectious disease, myopathies, heart, liver, lung, and neurodegenerative disease. Autophagy has therefore become an important target in drug discovery. Recent advances have identified new ways to monitor autophagy in vitro and in vivo. Many assays rely on visualizing autophagy-related intracellular markers such as microtubule-associated protein light chain 3 (LC3) II, which have posed issues with in vivo and clinical translation of the in vitro assays. Here, we present an overview of current in vitro and in vivo methodologies to measure autophagy with a special focus on the tumor microenvironment.