Bioinformatics Advances
FerroEnrich: an interactive web platform for liver-focused ferroptosis index scoring, enrichment, and ferroptosis–senescence cross-talk analysis
By Munichandra Tirumalasetty, Mayank Choubey, Mohammad Sarif Mohiuddin and 3 others.
Abstract
Abstract Motivation Ferroptosis is an iron-dependent regulated cell death process involving lipid peroxidation, redox imbalance, and impaired antioxidant defense. It is increasingly relevant to metabolic liver disease and non-alcoholic steatohepatitis. Existing ferroptosis resources mainly provide gene annotations and disease associations, but they do not offer an integrated workflow for user-uploaded transcriptome data, liver-focused enrichment, dataset-level scoring, and ferroptosis-senescence cross-talk analysis. Results We developed FerroEnrich, an open-source web platform for analyzing ferroptosis and senescence programs in human and mouse liver transcriptome datasets. FerroEnrich supports count matrix upload, metadata-guided differential expression analysis, identification of ferroptosis-prone and ferroptosis-resistant genes, dataset-level ferroptosis index scoring, sample-level susceptibility estimation, curated liver module enrichment, interaction network visualization, and ferroptosis-senescence cross-talk analysis. Application to human advanced non-alcoholic steatohepatitis and mouse diet-induced liver disease datasets demonstrated cross-species utility and identified conserved remodeling, including reduced ferroptosis-protective signatures and increased senescence- and fibrosis-associated modules. Availability and implementation FerroEnrich is freely available at https://ferroenrich.shinyapps.io/ferroenrich/. Source code, documentation, and demo datasets are available at the FerroEnrich GitHub repository.



