Macroautophagy (hereafter referred to as autophagy) is an evolutionarily conserved catabolic process that forms double-membrane vesicles named autophagosomes, engulfs cytoplasmic contents, and delivers them into lysosome (animals) or vacuole (plants and fungi) for the degradation (Wen and Klionsky, 2016). Autophagy determines cell survival or death, and regulates the cellular homeostasis, whereas dysregulation of autophagy is highly associated with human diseases such as cancer (Yu et al., 2018;Nakagawa et al., 2004). The core machinery of autophagy is highly conserved and constituted by a number of autophagy-related (ATG) genes (Yang and Klionsky, 2010;Ohsumi, 2014). To date, 41 ATG genes have been identified in yeasts, and 24 of them were conserved with orthologous counterparts in mammals. Besides ATG proteins, a considerable number of autophagy regulators as well as various post-translational modifications (PTMs) were reported to be involved in orchestrating autophagy (Galluzzi et al., 2017). Thus, a comprehensive data resource of proteins and PTMs involved in regulating autophagy will be a great help for biologists who are working in this field.

    From the literatures in PubMed, we have curated 4,237 experimentally identified proteins regulate in autophagy and cell death pathways from multiple eukaryotic species, with 3,882 proteins from 8 model organisms, including H. sapiens, M. musculus, R. norvegicus, D. rerio,S. cerevisiae, D. melanogaster, C. elegans, S. cerevisiae, and A. thaliana. 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 containied 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]