Abstract
Selective clearance of superfluous or dysfunctional mitochondria is a fundamental process that depends on the autophagic membrane trafficking pathways found in many cell types. This catabolic event, called mitophagy, is conserved from yeast to humans and serves to control mitochondrial quality and quantity. In budding yeast, degradation of mitochondria occurs under various physiological conditions, such as respiration at stationary phase, or starvation in a prolonged period. During these events, the transmembrane protein Atg32 localizes to the mitochondrial surface and plays a specific and essential role in yeast mitophagy. In this chapter, we describe methods to observe transport of mitochondria to the vacuole, a lytic compartment in yeast, using fluorescence microscopy, and semi-quantify the progression of Atg32-mediated mitophagy by Western blotting.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Akinori Eiyama for valuable comments on this manuscript, and Noriko Kondo-Okamoto for constructing yeast strains and establishing the original methods. This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 16H04784 and MEXT KAKENHI Grant Number 16H01203.
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Nagumo, S., Okamoto, K. (2017). Investigation of Yeast Mitophagy with Fluorescence Microscopy and Western Blotting. In: Hattori, N., Saiki, S. (eds) Mitophagy. Methods in Molecular Biology, vol 1759. Humana Press, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/7651_2017_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/7651_2017_11
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