ExoCarta 2024: A Web-based Repository of Small Extracellular Vesicles Cargo

Small extracellular vesicles (sEVs) are small membrane vesicles of endocytic origin secreted into the extracellular environment by all cell types and are known to play a crucial role in intercellular and intracellular communication. These vesicles contain proteins, nucleic acids and lipids and their molecular content reflect the normal and pathophysiological conditions of the host cells. Hence, there is a significant interest in cataloguing the molecular content of sEVs in various conditions as this would aid researchers in understanding the biological roles and altered cellular processes under various diseases and healthy state.

Here we report ExoCarta (https://www.exocarta.org), a freely accessible web-based compendium of studies that encompasses DNA, RNA, proteins, and lipids that are detected in sEVs. ExoCarta catalogues both published and unpublished sEV studies. Current version of ExoCarta contains data from 1249 sEV studies, 119,489 protein entries, 15,868 RNA entries, 3,946 lipid entries and quantitative data for 24,073 entries. QUANT, a quantitative plugin, enables users to compare protein abundance between conditions in a study for gene/protein of interest in real time. ExoCarta provides Gene Ontology (GO) annotations and reactome pathways along with dynamic protein–protein interaction networks, for sEV proteins. A tab delimited file containing the most identified sEV proteins is available for users to download. The integration of sEV DNA studies, QUANT and regularly updated dataset of the ExoCarta database makes it an invaluable resource for small extracellular vesicles researchers across the globe.