EVpedia: a community web portal for extracellular vesicles research

Motivation: Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are spherical bilayered proteolipids, harboring various bio- active molecules. Due to the complexity of the vesicular nomenclatures and components, online searches for EV-related publications and vesicular components are currently challenging. Results: We present an improved version of EVpedia, a public database for EVs research. This com- munity web portal contains a database of publications and vesicular components, identification of orthologous vesicular components, bioinformatic tools and a personalized function. EVpedia in- cludes 6879 publications, 172 080 vesicular components from 263 high-throughput datasets, and has been accessed more than 65 000 times from more than 750 cities. In addition, about 350 mem- bers from 73 international research groups have participated in developing EVpedia. This free web- based database might serve as a useful resource to stimulate the emerging field of EV research. Availability and implementation: The web site was implemented in PHP, Java, MySQL and Apache, and is freely available at http://evpedia.info.