dbCRSR: a manually curated database for regulation of cancer radiosensitivity

Radiotherapy is used to treat approximately 50% of all cancer patients, with varying prognoses. Intrinsic radiosensitivity is an important factor underlying the radiotherapeutic efficacy of this precise treatment. During the past decades, great efforts have been made to improve radiotherapy treatment through multiple strategies. However, invaluable data remains buried in the extensive radiotherapy literature, making it difficult to obtain an overall view of the detailed mechanisms leading to radiosensitivity, thus limiting advances in radiotherapy. To address this issue, we collected data from the relevant literature contained in the PubMed database and developed a literature-based database that we term the cancer radiosensitivity regulation factors database (dbCRSR). dbCRSR is a manually curated catalogue of radiosensitivity, containing multiple radiosensitivity regulation factors (395 coding genes, 119 non-coding RNAs and 306 chemical compounds) with appropriate annotation. To illustrate the value of the data we collected, data mining was performed including functional annotation and network analysis. In summary, dbCRSR is the first literature-based database to focus on radiosensitivity and provides a resource to better understand the detailed mechanisms of radiosensitivity. We anticipate dbCRSR will be a useful resource to enrich our knowledge and to promote further study of radiosensitivity.