PREreview of Lamp1 mediates lipid transport, but is dispensable for autophagy inDrosophila

Summary of the work:

Authors found a novel role of LAMP1 in Drosophila which is not essential for autophagy or viability but rather required in lipid metabolism compared to its vertebrate homologs where its known to show autophagy defects and embryonic lethality. They found homozygous Lamp1 mutants in Drosophila to be viable and show no developmental delay. Nor do they show any macro/micro autophagy defects.But during starvation, they have seen increase in acidic vesicles in fat bodies suggesting its independent role in lipid homeostasis during stress conditions.

Comments

All the experiments and methods seem fine to address the problem. Few comments I think could be addressable.

-Why is just starvation used as a stress condition, authors could have tried other methods of stress induction like ROS by H2O2 to validate their claims.

-Secondly, in methods, the fly heads are homogenized and protein was estimated by lowry method. This could be error-prone as the eye pigments in the Drosophila can interfere with the absorbance of Lowry assay(660nm).

Reference : CR Sharkey et.al, 2020 :The spectral sensitivity of Drosophila photoreceptors.