Rph1 mediates the nutrient-limitation signaling pathway leading to transcriptional activation of autophagy.

To maintain proper cellular homeostasis, the magnitude of autophagy activity has to be finely tuned in response to environmental changes. Many aspects of autophagy regulation have been extensively studied: pathways integrating signals through the master regulators TORC1 and PKA lead to multiple post-translational modifications affecting the functions, protein-protein interactions, and localization of Atg proteins. The expression of several ATG genes increases sharply upon autophagy induction conditions, and defects in ATG gene expression are associated with various diseases, pointing to the importance of transcriptional regulation of autophagy. Yet, how changes in ATG gene expression affect the rate of autophagy is not well characterized, and transcriptional regulators of the autophagy pathway remain largely unknown. To identify such regulators, we analyzed the expression of several ATG genes in a library of DNA-binding protein mutants. This led to the identification of Rph1 as a master transcriptional regulator of autophagy.