Programmed cell death (PCD) is a critical biological process, serving many important functions within multicellular organisms mainly consists of apoptosis, autophagy and necrosis. Apoptosis is the most extensively investigated cell death subroutine. After decades of studies, the molecular features and signal pathways modulating apoptosis have been resolved in great details. Autophagy constitutes a stress adaptation that avoids cell death while induces an alternative pathway to cellular demise that is called autophagic cell death. Previously, necrosis was thought as an uncontrolled type of cell death, nevertheless, its programmed nature and the genetic components are continually identified recently.
Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are a class of functional RNA molecules including miRNAs, lncRNAs and snoRNAs et.al, which do not translate into proteins but play an essential role in regulating the expression of coding genes. In the past few years, increasing evidences suggested that aberrant expression of ncRNAs regulate different subroutines of PCD. Therefore, a knowledge depository, which integrates information for both ncRNAs and their targets in PCD network, will be of great help. Hence, we developed ncRDeathDB (http://rna-world.org/ncRDeathDB/) based on miRDeathDB, which allows users to browse, search and analyze the PCD associated ncRNAs. Comparing with miRDeathDB, ncRDeathDB not only possesses a larger number of data by retrieving more references and adding homologous prediction, but also enriches RNA types by including lncRNA and snoRNA in current version. Further more, by integrating and investigating these data with other resources such as binding sites and network visualization, a global picture of ncRNA-mediated PCD network is maturity.