The Cell Death Census 2024

Abstract

Cell death plays a pivotal role in many physiological processes, such as cell homeostasis, embryonic development, immune defence and in the pathophysiology of numerous diseases, such as cancer, infections and degenerative diseases. However, the lack of a comprehensive and up-to-date resource on cell death regulators poses a significant challenge to researchers in the field. Existing databases are often limited in scope, differ in content and are updated irregularly. This deficiency impedes progress in understanding the intricate molecular mechanisms governing cell death and hampers the development of targeted therapies. To address this, we have performed a census of the existing cell death databases as well as the cell death-associated entries in the UniProt and Gene Ontology databases. To ensure high quality, we have focused on manually curated entries rather than those created from automatic prediction tools. The results have been consolidated into a joint database of the known cell death regulators, including both proteins and non-coding RNAs. The Cell Death Census 2024 results and the associated python code for database parsing, cleaning and merging is publicly available athttps://github.com/Aitslab/CellDeathCensus/.