EVAtlas

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) released by live cells are important vectors for signal transduction and cell communication, especially for the interactivity between distant cells. Exosomes secreted from endosomal system and microvesicles (MVs) shed from plasma membrane are the two main sources of EVs. Since the consensus has not yet emerged on specific markers of EV subtypes, it is difficult to discriminate exosomes and microvesicles without live imaging techniques. As we collected datasets from various studies in which researchers used different EV isolation methods, we unified these datasets EV nomenclature based on MISEV2018 guidelines to minimize ambiguity. In our EVAtlas, we classified EV type by physical size into small EV (sEV) and large EV (lEV) based on the EV isolation methods described in papers. The contents of EVs comprise multiple kinds of biomolecules from source cells, such as lipid, protein, metabolite, DNA and RNA. Non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are well-studied and important molecules in EVs, which can be delivered into and regulate target cells, and show a physiological- and pathological-specificity to serve as candidate biomarkers.

Extracellular Vesicle Atlas (EVAtlas) is an update of EVmiRNA database. We performed a unified read dynamic assignment algorithm (RDAA) considering mismatch and multi-mapping reads to quantify the expression profiles of seven ncRNA types (miRNA, snoRNA, piRNA, snRNA, rRNA, tRNA and Y RNA) in more than 2,030 high-quality small RNA-seq datasets of EV samples from 24 human tissues of different conditions (disease and normal). EVAtlas provides four functional modules: (i) browse and compare the distribution of ncRNAs in EVs from 24 conditions and eight sources (plasma, serum, saliva, urine, sperm, breast milk, primary cell and cell line ); (ii) prioritize candidate ncRNAs in condition related tissues based on their expression; (iii) explore the specifically expressed ncRNAs in EVs from 24 conditions; (iv) investigate ncRNA functions, related drugs, target genes and EVs isolation methods.