Originally, it was assumed that autophagy was exclusively a bulk process. Recent experimental evidences have demonstrated that through the use of autophagy receptors and adaptors, this pathway can be selective by exclusively degrading specific cellular constituents. The list of physiological and pathological situations where autophagy is selective is constantly growing and this fact challenges the earliest concept whether autophagy can be nonselective. It is believe that under starvation, cytoplasmic structures are randomly engulfed by autophagosomes and delivered into the lysosome to be degraded and thus generate an internal pool of nutrients. In yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, however, the degradation of ribosomes, for example, ribophagy, as well as mitophagy and pexophagy, and the transport of the prApe1 oligomer into the vacuole under the same conditions requires the presence of autophagy receptors [97, [193] [194] [195] . As a result, these observations suggest that autophagy could potentially always operate selectively. This is a conceivable hypothesis because this process allows the cell to survive stress conditions and the casual elimination of cytoplasmic structure in the same scenario could lead to the lethal depletion of an organelle crucial for cell survival. Future studies will certainly provide more molecular insights into the regulation and mechanism of the selective types of autophagy, and this information will also be important to determine if indeed bulk autophagy exists.