Autophagy's Crucial Role in Oral Tissue Regeneration: A Comprehensive Review

The oral cavity is a unique environment that requires constant remodeling and regeneration, making autophagy crucial for oral tissue regeneration. Moreover, the oral cavity is home to a large number of bacterial colonizers, and many oral diseases are caused by bacterial infections and subsequent immune reactions. Autophagy has been shown to play a role in controlling the burden of infectious agents, limiting inflammatory pathologies, regulating myeloid/lymphoid cell differentiation, and coordinating multicellular immunity. Given autophagy's role in repairing damaged tissue, it is closely associated with oral tissue regeneration. Despite numerous studies exploring the role of autophagy in oral diseases and oral tissue regeneration, no systematic reviews have been conducted on the subject.

This review focuses on the contribution of autophagy to stem cell regulation and oral tissue regeneration. It discusses the role of autophagy in alleviating the survival stress of oral stem cells and provides an overview of autophagy machinery in eukaryotes. The review also examines how autophagy contributes to different components of oral tissue regeneration and introduces the molecular mechanisms involved in autophagy-regulated oral tissue regeneration. Additionally, the review explores how autophagy can be regulated by small molecule drugs, biomaterials, exosomes/RNAs, or other specific treatments. Finally, the review discusses new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration. However, many questions remain unanswered regarding how autophagy contributes to oral tissue regeneration, and further mechanistic studies are needed for therapeutic purposes. This review provides valuable insights into autophagy studies on oral tissue regeneration and other tissue regeneration, and it may offer new perspectives on human tissue regeneration.