Macroautophagy has been implicated as a mechanism of cell death. However, the
relationship between this degradative pathway and cell death is unclear as macroautophagy
has been shown recently to protect against apoptosis. To better define the interplay between
these two critical cellular processes, we determined whether inhibition of macroautophagy
could have both pro-apoptotic and anti-apoptotic effects in the same cell. Embryonic
fibroblasts from mice with a knock-out of the essential macroautophagy gene atg5 were …