For this purpose, we treated SMMC-7721 and MHCC-LM3 cells with EPI or EPI+UTI, the increase of LC3-II and decrease of SQSTM1 were significantly inhibited by EPI+UTI treatment, suggesting that the EPI-induced autophagy was inhibited by the addition of UTI (Fig 1D). Here, SQSTM1 is linked to bacterial urinary tract infection.