Podocytes exhibit an unusually high level of constitutive autophagy, and a recent report showed that podocyte-specific deletion of the Atg5 gene which is known as one of the autophagy conjugation systems led to podocyte injury such as proteinuria, foot process effacement, vacuolation and progressive development of glomerulosclerosis, which are similar to the structural abnormalities observed in Tsc2Δpodocyte mice [31, 32]. Here, ATG5 is linked to glomerulosclerosis.