SQSTM1 and COVID-19: Tomić et al. (2021) showed that in COVID-19 patients, transcript levels of autophagy-promoting factors including ATG5, UVRAG, and LC3 were significantly decreased in PBMCs compared to controls, and this phenomenon was more pronounced in patients with severe disease. Furthermore, Beclin-1 and p62/SQSTM expression was not significantly altered, but positively correlated with the other genes (Tomić et al., 2021).