Autophagy in Oral Tissue Regeneration: A Comprehensive Review

The oral cavity is a unique environment that requires constant remodeling and regeneration, which means that autophagy is necessary for oral tissue regeneration. Additionally, the oral cavity often contains a large number of bacterial colonizers, and many oral diseases are caused by bacterial infection 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. Combined with the role of autophagy in repairing damaged tissue, it is clear that autophagy is closely associated with oral tissue regeneration.

Although many studies have explored the role of autophagy in oral diseases and oral tissue regeneration, there have been no systematic reviews on the subject. In this review, we focus on how autophagy contributes to stem cell regulation and oral tissue regeneration. We discuss the role of autophagy in alleviating the survival stress of oral stem cells and provide an overview of the autophagy machinery in eukaryotes. Furthermore, we review how autophagy contributes to different components of oral tissue regeneration and introduce the molecular mechanisms involved in autophagy-regulated oral tissue regeneration. We also discuss how to regulate autophagy by small molecule drugs, biomaterials, exosomes/RNAs, or other specific treatments.

Finally, we discuss new perspectives on autophagy manipulation and oral tissue regeneration. However, it is still unclear how autophagy contributes to oral tissue regeneration, and mechanistic studies are still necessary to address many questions for therapeutic purposes. Our review may be helpful for further autophagy studies on oral tissue and other tissue regeneration, and we hope to provide new insights into human tissue regeneration.