LGALS8 and viral infectious disease: In contrast, galectin-8, one of cytosolic lectins, acts as a pattern and/or danger recognition receptor for intracellular pathogens and mediates selective autophagy against bacterial and viral infection (Thurston et al., 2012; Montespan et al., 2017), galectin-8 senses highly glycosylated viral proteins, such as SARS-CoV-2 spike, and then triggers antiviral xenophagy or virophagy, while SARS-CoV-2-encoded 3CLpro cleaves galectin-8 and the adaptor FYCO1 and thus disrupts xenophagy to evade antiviral autophagy (Pablos et al., 2021).