Protein complexes and neighborhoods driving autophagy

Autophagy summarizes evolutionarily conserved, intracellular degradation processes targeting cytoplasmic material for lysosomal degradation. These encompass constitutive processes as well as stress responses, which are often found dysregulated in diseases. Autophagy pathways help in the clearance of damaged organelles, protein aggregates and macromolecules, mediating their recycling and maintaining cellular homeostasis. Protein-protein interaction networks contribute to autophagosome biogenesis, substrate loading, vesicular trafficking and fusion, protein translocations across membranes and degradation in lysosomes. Hypothesis-free proteomic approaches tremendously helped in the functional characterization of protein-protein interactions to uncover molecular mechanisms regulating autophagy. In this review, we elaborate on the importance of understanding protein-protein-interactions of varying affinities and on the strengths of mass spectrometry-based proteomic approaches to study these, generating new mechanistic insights into autophagy regulation. We discuss in detail affinity purification approaches and recent developments in proximity labeling coupled to mass spectrometry, which uncovered molecular principles of autophagy mechanisms. Abbreviations: AMPK: AMP-activated protein kinase; AP-MS: affinity purification-mass spectrometry; APEX2: ascorbate peroxidase-2; ATG: autophagy related; BioID: proximity-dependent biotin identification; ER: endoplasmic reticulum; GFP: green fluorescent protein; iTRAQ: isobaric tag for relative and absolute quantification; MS: mass spectrometry; PCA: protein-fragment complementation assay; PL-MS: proximity labeling-mass spectrometry; PtdIns3P: phosphatidylinositol-3-phosphate; PTM: posttranslational modification; PUP-IT: pupylation-based interaction tagging; RFP: red fluorescent protein; SILAC: stable isotope labeling by amino acids in cell culture; TAP: tandem affinity purification; TMT: tandem mass tag.