Cell death especially Programmed cell-death (or PCD) is critical for development and health of multicellular organisms. Previously, apoptosis is identified to be the primary mechanism while cells are eliminated physiologically in metazoan organisms or plants (Kerr et al., 1972). Recently, in contrast to traditionally consideration as a simple way to die, necrosis has emerged as an alternate form of programmed cell death (Proskuryakov et al., 2003). Furthermore, besides its functions as a survival strategy under stress, autophagy was considered to be another programmed cell death (Tsujimoto and Shimizu et al., 2005). During the last several decades, numerous studies were contributed to characterize these biological processes, especially apoptosis, which was previously considerd to be an anti-cancer mechanism (Hickman et al., 1992). Recent studies suggested that necrosis and autophagy might also be implicated in tumor supression (Proskuryakov et al., 2003; Maycotte and Thorburnet al., 2011), while defect of these cell death processes usually lead to cancer (Hickman et al., 1992; Edinger and Thompsonet al., 2003).

    From the literatures in PubMed, we have curated the experimentally identified proteins which regulate apoptosis, necrosis and/or autophagy (THANATOS) from S. cerevisiae, C. elegans, D. melanogaster, M. musculus , R. norvegicus, D. rerio, A. thaliana, and H. sapiens. Furthermore, ortholog searches were performed in 164 eukaryotes. Then the integrated and searchable database THANATOS (THe Autophagy, Necrosis, ApopTosis OrchestratorS) was established. Currently, the THANATOS database was updated on May 07, 2017, containing 191,543 unique protein entries. The database will be updated routinely as new thanatos proteins are reported.

THANATOS: an integrative data resource of proteins and post-translational modifications in the regulation of autophagy Wankun Deng, Lili Ma, Ying Zhang, Jiaqi Zhou, Yongbo Wang, Zexian Liu and Yu Xue. Autophagy. 2018;14(2):296-310. doi: 10.1080/15548627.2017.1402990. [Abstract]