Autophagy is an important mechanism of innate immune defense. We have recently shown that autophagy components are recruited with septins, a new and increasingly characterized cytoskeleton component, to intracytosolic Shigella that have started to polymerize actin. On the other hand, intracytosolic Listeria avoids autophagy recognition by expressing ActA, a bacterial effector required for actin polymerization. Here, we exploit Shigella and Listeria as intracytosolic tools to characterize different pathways of selective autophagy. We show that the ubiquitin-binding adaptor proteins p62 and NDP52 target Shigella to an autophagy pathway dependent upon septin and actin. In contrast, p62 or NDP52 targets the Listeria ActA mutant to an autophagy pathway independent of septin or actin. TNF-␣, a host cytokine produced upon bacterial infection, stimulates p62-mediated autophagic activity and restricts the survival of Shigella and the Listeria ActA mutant. These data provide a new molecular framework to understand the emerging complexity of autophagy and its ability to achieve specific clearance of intracytosolic bacteria.Autophagy is an evolutionarily conserved catabolic pathway that allows eukaryotes to degrade and recycle intracellular components by sequestering proteins and organelles in specialized double-membrane vesicles named autophagosomes (1-3). Although autophagosomes can sequester cytosolic material nonspecifically, e.g. as a response to starvation, there is increasing evidence for selective autophagic degradation of various cellular structures, including protein aggregates, mitochondria, and microbes (4, 5). The mechanism of selective autophagy is not well understood, yet the role of ubiquitin in this process is critical (5, 6). By simultaneous binding to both ubiquitin and the autophagosome-associated ubiquitin-like proteins (i.e. LC3/GABARAP proteins) autophagy receptors can mediate docking of ubiquitinated cargo to the autophagosome, thereby ensuring their selective degradation (5, 6). Of the ubiquitinbinding proteins in selective autophagy, p62 (sequestosome 1; SQSTM1) has emerged as the prototype autophagy receptor (7). p62 is an LC3 interaction partner in vivo and is constantly degraded by autophagy, establishing it as a useful marker for autophagic vesicle turnover (8). NDP52 3 has more recently emerged as another autophagy receptor and shares with p62 the ability to bind LC3 and ubiquitinated cargo simultaneously (9). The respective roles of p62 and NDP52 are not understood. Whether these individual autophagy receptors recognize different ubiquitinated proteins and/or perform independent functions in cells may be critical for the complete understanding of autophagy and its therapeutic potential.Recent evidence has implicated the cytoskeleton as a critical mediator of selective autophagy. We have shown that septins, a novel component of the cytoskeleton (10), are recruited with autophagy proteins to "cage" Shigella flexneri in the cytosol of infected cells and restrict bacterial dissemination (11). The...