Autophagy promotes programmed cell death and corpse clearance in specific cell types of the Arabidopsis root cap

Summary

Autophagy is a conserved quality control pathway that mediates the degradation of unnecessary or dysfunctional cellular components by targeting them to the lysosomes or central vacuoles. Autophagy has been implicated in the regulation or execution of regulated cell death processes in a wide range of eukaryotes. However, its function in developmentally controlled programmed cell death (dPCD) in plants remains little studied and controversial. Here, we investigated the role of autophagy in dPCD using the Arabidopsis root cap as an accessible and genetically tractable model system. We show that autophagic flux is induced prior to dPCD execution in both root cap tissues, the columella and the lateral root cap (LRC), and impaired in autophagy-deficient mutants. These mutants show a strongly delayed cell death and an absence of corpse clearance in the columella during and after their shedding into the rhizosphere. However, autophagy deficiency does not affect dPCD execution or corpse clearance in LRC cells at the distal end of the root cap. Our results demonstrate that autophagy promotes dPCD in a highly cell-type specific manner, and present the root cap as a powerful model system to study organ-specific autophagy in vivo.