Plant seedlings are not photoautotrophs until they are equipped with photosynthetic machinery. Some plant cells are remodeled after being exposed to light, and a group of peroxisomal proteins are degraded during the remodeling. Autophagy was proposed as one of the mechanisms for the degradation of peroxisomal proteins. We recently showed that ATG7-dependent autophagy is partially responsible for the degradation of obsolete peroxisomal proteins during Arabidopsis seedling growth.
Keywords: ATG; autophagosome; autophagy-related; degradation; hypocotyl; pexophagy.