Cellular homeostasis requires the balanced regulation of anabolic and catabolic processes. While anabolic metabolism consumes energy to build up cellular components, catabolic processes break down organic matters in order to provide energy for the cell and its anabolic processes. Autophagy is a highly conserved and regulated catabolic process by which the eukaryotic cell degrades unnecessary, undesirable, or dysfunctional cellular components, including organelles (1–3). Autophagy is induced by a variety of extra-and intracellular stress stimuli, such as nutrient starvation, oxidative stress, or accumulation of damaged organelles or toxic protein aggregates. Initiation of autophagy first leads to the formation of cup-shaped structures known as phagophores that engulf the undesirable or damaged cellular components. Subsequent elongation of phagophores form double-membrane vesicles called autophagosomes, which deliver their cargo to lysosomes where the content is degraded and recycled (1–3). Autophagy plays a central role in quality control of organelles and proteins, and additionally is a key mechanism to maintain cellular energy levels and nutrient homeostasis during starvation, promoting the recycling and salvage of cellular nutrients. Furthermore, the cellular autophagic machinery is also used to remove invading intracellular pathogens, a process called xenophagy (1, 2). In this case, phagophores engulf invading microbes forming autophagosomes and steering them toward lysosomal degradation. Thus, xenophagy is an innate immune mechanism against bacterial infection that has been shown to be essential to restrict intracellular growth of many bacteria such as Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (4), Mycobacterium tuberculosis (5, 6), Listeria monocytogenes (7), or Group A Streptococcus (8).

Detection of bacterial components in the cytoplasm of mammalian cells induces autophagy via the activation of toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) by bacterial lipopolysaccharide (LPS) and recognition of bacterial peptidoglycan by NOD1 and NOD2 (9, 10). TLR-and NOD-like receptor (NLR)-induced autophagy can be initiated during entry, uptake, or phagocytosis of bacteria by the host cell (10, 11), but bacteria can also be sensed by the Sequestosome-1-like receptors (SLRs) when they are already in the cytosol (1)(Figure 1 A). In both cases, recruitment of autophagy proteins to the phagosome, such as the ULK1 complex, Beclin1, and ATG16L1, initiates membrane nucleation of the phagophore that will engulf the intracellular bacteria (10–12)(Figure 1 B). ATG5–ATG12 associates with ATG16L1 and the ATG5–ATG12–ATG16L1 complex facilitates the addition of a phosphatidylethanolamine (PE) group to the carboxyl terminus of LC3, which function together with other factors to assemble, elongate, and allow the closure of nascent autophagosomes (1)(Figure 1 C). In addition to this canonical mechanism of autophagy, phagosomes containing bacteria can recruit directly LC3, a process called LC3-associated phagocytosis (LAP). Upon delivery to phagosomes, LC3 promotes phagosome maturation and degradation of the content. Therefore, both LAP and canonical autophagy involve the enclosure of bacteria in an LC3-decorated compartment that is targeted for degradation by fusion with the lysosome (2). Membranes from the ER, the Golgi apparatus, the ER–mitochondria contact sites, or the plasma membrane contribute to the elongation of the double membrane of the phagophore in order to form the autophagosome (1)(Figure 1 D). The attachment of syntaxin 17 to the autophagosomal membrane enables the fusion with lysosomes and …