Artophagy: the art of autophagy--the Cvt pathway.

Science informs art, and art informs science. Both processes involve creativity and imagination, and collaboration between scientists and artists often leads to new insights in both fields. We took advantage of the power of artistic imagery to demonstrate a dynamic cellular process, autophagy. In particular, we depicted the cytoplasm to vacuole targeting pathway, which involves dynamic membrane rearrangements to sequester a specific cargo via an autophagy-related process. By depicting this event in the context of a crowded cellular milieu, we hoped to stimulate researchers to consider aspects of the process that might be overlooked in the overly simplistic schematic drawing that typify most scientific models.