Autophagy is an important homeostatic cellular recycling mechanism which plays a key role in diverse pathologies. The goal of HAMdb is to provide the up-to-date information of existing autophagy-related modulators (proteins, chemicals and microRNA) including their specific effect on autophagy, pathway and disease information. Additionally, some basic information (structural and physicochemical information) and most commonly used links are also added to provide more details.

HAMdb is easy to use for researchers. For chemical searching, general name, synonyms, trade names terms and CAS number can be used as an input (Example: search for Chloroquine, the following terms can be used: "Chloroquine", "Aralen" or "54-05-7"). A specific protein can query using gene name, synonyms, and uniport ID (Example: search for AKT1 can query using "AKT1" or "P31749"). As to microRNA, the general name can be used for searching (Example: mir-10 can be queried using "mir-10").