ncFO: A Comprehensive Resource of Curated and Predicted ncRNAs Associated with Ferroptosis

Abstract

Ferroptosis is a form of regulated cell death driven by the accumulation of lipid hydroperoxides. Regulation of ferroptosis might be beneficial to cancer treatment. Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are a class of RNA transcripts that generally cannot encode proteins and have been demonstrated to play critical roles in regulating ferroptosis. Herein, we developed ncFO, the ncRNA–ferroptosis association database, to document the manually curated and predicted ncRNAs that are associated with ferroptosis. Collectively, ncFO contains 90 experimentally verified entries, including 46 microRNAs (miRNAs), 21 long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs), and 17 circular RNAs (circRNAs). In addition, ncFO also incorporates two online prediction tools based on the regulation and co-expression of ncRNA and ferroptosis genes. Using default parameters, we obtained 3260 predicted entries, including 598 miRNAs and 178 lncRNAs, by regulation, as well as 2,592,661 predicted entries, including 967 miRNAs and 9632 lncRNAs, by ncRNA–ferroptosis gene co-expression in more than 8000 samples across 20 cancer types. The detailed information of each entry includes ncRNA name, disease, species, tissue, target, regulation, publication time, and PubMed identifier. ncFO also provides survival analysis and differential expression analysis for ncRNAs. In summary, ncFO offers a user-friendly platform to search and predict ferroptosis-associated ncRNAs, which might facilitate research on ferroptosis and discover potential targets for cancer treatment. ncFO can be accessed at http://www.jianglab.cn/ncFO/.