The Pro-apoptotic STK38 Kinase Is a New Beclin1 Partner Positively Regulating Autophagy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Autophagy plays key roles in development, oncogenesis, cardiovascular, metabolic, and neurodegenerative diseases. Hence, understanding how autophagy is regulated can reveal opportunities to modify autophagy in a disease-relevant manner. Ideally, one would want to functionally define autophagy regulators whose enzymatic activity can potentially be modulated. Here, we describe the STK38 protein kinase (also termed NDR1) as a conserved regulator of autophagy. Using STK38 as bait in yeast-two-hybrid screens, we discovered STK38 as a novel binding partner of Beclin1, a key regulator of autophagy. By combining molecular, cell biological, and genetic approaches, we show that STK38 promotes autophagosome formation in human cells and in Drosophila. Upon autophagy induction, STK38-depleted cells display impaired LC3B-II conversion; reduced ATG14L, ATG12, and WIPI-1 puncta formation; and significantly decreased Vps34 activity, as judged by PI3P formation. Furthermore, we observed that STK38 supports the interaction of the exocyst component Exo84 with Beclin1 and RalB, which is required to initiate autophagosome formation. Upon studying the activation of STK38 during autophagy induction, we found that STK38 is stimulated in a MOB1- and exocyst-dependent manner. In contrast, RalB depletion triggers hyperactivation of STK38, resulting in STK38-dependent apoptosis under prolonged autophagy conditions. Together, our data establish STK38 as a conserved regulator of autophagy in human cells and flies. We also provide evidence demonstrating that STK38 and RalB assist the coordination between autophagic and apoptotic events upon autophagy induction, hence further proposing a role for STK38 in determining cellular fate in response to autophagic conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".