Our proteomic approach revealed that 5-AZA long-term treatment induces autophagy in MDS-BMMCs, through several triggers: (i) increase of active Abl-Tyr735; (ii) increase of PLC-γ-Tyr783 which activates AKT (Wang et al., 2006); (iii) increase of p62, associated with phosphorylation of AKT-Thr308. The gene discussed is ABL1; the disease is myelodysplastic syndrome.