Autophagy in the developing Drosophila brain

Abstract

Autophagy is the process by which a cell sends cytosolic material to the lysosome for digestion. In this work, I investigated the importance of autophagy to lipid droplet formation and protein turnover in the neural stem cells, neurons, and glia of the larval Drosophila brain. The role of the endomembrane system in autophagy in neurons and neural stem cells was also considered, as was the movement of acid-resistant protein from neural stem cell lineage to the surrounding cortex glia. The location of various proteins involved in nutrient sensing and autophagic induction was also determined, and the reproducibility of manual image classification attempts was assessed using deep learning.