Background: Autophagy is an intracellular lysosomal degradation pathway implicated in many diseases, but there are currently no specific autophagy inhibitors.Results: Small molecule inhibition of ULK1, the upstream autophagy initiating kinase, blocks autophagosome initiation and maturation.Conclusion: ULK1 plays a role in autophagosome maturation as well as initiation.Significance: ULK1 can be targeted to block autophagy for disease therapy.

In Fig. 1A, the molecular structures of the compounds for MRT67307 and MRT68921 were mistakenly switched. The corrected figure is shown below. This correction does not affect the interpretation of the results or conclusions of this work.

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