DeathBase: a database on structure, evolution and function of proteins involved in apoptosis and other forms of cell death.

摘要

Programmed cell death has attracted enormous attention in the past few years. The relevance of this process to human disease has triggered an explosion of articles on cell death, and particularly, on apoptosis, as the main form of cell death in animals. For non-experts, literature searches to find the most relevant information about the key apoptotic molecules become a nightmare: they will find 170000 citations related to apoptosis in Pubmed. Even for scientists working on cell biology and/or cell death, it is very difficult to identify the key apoptotic proteins, or their roles, among the thousands of proteins that could be related to cell death in one way or another. Finally, experimental information obtained for homologous proteins in different model species is dispersed, and there is a need to integrate it into a clear evolutionary framework. For this reason, we have developed the Death-Base (http://www.deathbase.org).