In human metabolic liver diseases, genetic association between non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and variants of IRGM, an autophagy gene activated by infection (Grégoire et al., 2011) has been observed (Lin et al., 2016), suggesting the role of decreased autophagy-mediated lipid clearance or lipophagy in the development of human NAFLD. Here, IRGM is linked to metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease.