New revision

Some more citations have been added and the LuLu version has been updated.

Autoimmune Diseases

Some evidence that protein cycling may benefit autoimmune diseases too! 

New revision

Some significant revisions have been made.  A chapter on incomplete autophagy was added to clarify what contitutes actual autophagy upregulation.  Also more diseases are being reported as having underlying cryptic infections.  And even more substances, nicotine for example, are now seen to affect autophagy.  A recent on-line open-access scientific review of the subject is now available at http://www.molecularneurodegeneration.com/content/4/1/16 and I wanted to add that reference as well...

Trehalose

Trehalose is an autophagy inducer too.  Guess I better add it to the book....

Infectious Diseases

I see that yet another infectious micro-organism has been found to hide in vacuoles inside cells

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-01/sfeb-hpc012709.php.

In this case it is Helicobacter pylori, the main cause of ulcers that now joins the agents of Legionnaire's disease, listeriosis,  Lyme disease, Crohn's disease, and tuberculosis in using this strategy.   Presumably it also suppresses the mechanism that normally merges such vacuoles with lysosomes to destroy the pathogen. Perhaps autophagy induction by protein cycling would override the suppression and eliminate this organism as well.  Dr. Steven R. Goodman, Editor-in-Chief of Experimental Biology and Medicine stated "This study also has potential implications for new anti-H. pylori drugs that target the enhancement of autophagy."  Indeed this subject deserves  its own chapter in the book and has been added.

Diabetes and amyloid

Reading about amyloid plaques maybe causing diabetes (LINK) ...  Very interesting.  I may add it to the book after I digest it.  By the way, Science Daily is an excellent free on-line resource for researching any science topic.  It provides hyperlinks to related articles and reports on all significant developments in all scientific fields.  The articles are readable but not dumbed down.

Lysosome Exocytosis

What happens to to lysosomes?  Do they stay around forever or do they eventually break up?  What do they do with stuff they cannot digest?  In looking for answers to these questions, I've come across reports that lysosomes participate in exocytosis to repair the cell membrane when it is broken http://www.pnas.org/content/101/48/16795.full .  If lysosomes routinely exocytose then that could answer some of my questions.  Perhaps they exocytose when they have fully digested their contents and thereby dump any undigestibles and disappear quietly.  This might explain how the aggregate proteins in AD appear as plaques outside the cell as well as within.  I may also explain how aggregate proteins could move to other cells to seed new mis-folding cascades.