Currently, in studies on myelodysplastic syndromes, ATG3-mediated autophagy was found to have an inhibitory effect on the survival of MDS cells, and upregulation of ATG3 expression in MDS cells promoted Akt-mTOR-dependent autophagy, which inhibited the proliferation as well as promoted apoptosis of MDS cells (Wang et al., 2014; Zhuang et al., 2016). Here, ATG3 is linked to myelodysplastic syndrome.