The vacuole/lysosome serves an important recycling function during starvation and
senescence in eukaryotes via a process called autophagy. Here bulk cytosolic constituents
and organelles become sequestered in specialized autophagic vesicles, which then deliver
their cargo to the vacuole for degradation. In yeasts, genetic screens have identified two
novel post-translational modification pathways remarkably similar to ubiquitination that are
required for autophagy. From searches of the Arabidopsisgenome, we have identified gene …