“…However, the extent to which this is necessary in order to firmly prove causality should not be underestimated. The reason for this is firstly that, as opposed to what was assumed upon their initial identification in the 1990s, most, if not all, ATG proteins have non-autophagic cellular functions ( Yousefi et al, 2006 ; Gan and Guan, 2008 ; Baisamy et al, 2009 ; Hanson et al, 2010 ; DeSelm et al, 2011 ; Chung et al, 2012 ; Lee et al, 2012 ; Velikkakath et al, 2012 ; Maskey et al, 2013 ; Elgendy et al, 2014 ; Rohatgi et al, 2015 ; Chen et al, 2016 ; Joo et al, 2016 ; Joshi et al, 2016 ; Kaizuka and Mizushima, 2016 ; Nunes et al, 2016 ; Yang et al, 2016 ; Guo et al, 2017 ; Ramkumar et al, 2017 ; Wang and Kundu, 2017 ; Cadwell and Debnath, 2018 ; Saleiro et al, 2018 ; Galluzzi and Green, 2019 ; Hu et al, 2020 ; Lindner et al, 2020 ; Wu et al, 2020 ; Fang et al, 2021 ; Li et al, 2021 ; Mailler et al, 2021 ; Nieto-Torres et al, 2021 ; Sun et al, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2022a ; Hamaoui and Subtil, 2022 ; Rajak et al, 2022 ; Chen et al, 2023 ; Deng et al, 2023 ; Liang et al, 2023 ; Wang et al, 2023 ; Tedesco et al, 2024 ; Tran et al, 2024 ; Yoon et al, 2024 ) that are likely to influence the cellular/phenotypic effects that are observed upon their knockdown, knockout or overexpression, and many of these functions affect pathways that are highly relevant to cancer. Therefore, in order to infer causality, the same cellular/phenotypic effect must be observed upon interference with a number of different ATGs.…”