Recently, the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Urban Environment have carried out interdisciplinary data cooperation to jointly build an extracellular vesicle database. The related achievements are titled EV-COMM: A database of interspecies and intercultural interactions mediated by extracellar vehicles and published in the Journal of Extracellar Vehicles.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are nanoscale particles secreted by living organisms, which mediate the interaction between the environment and living organisms by carrying and delivering functional molecules such as RNA, proteins, and metabolites. They have become widely studied signal communication carriers. There are already EVs databases that focus on functional molecules in EVs, but do not include species information for interactions, lacking complete knowledge chain data on interactions mediated by EVs, which cannot meet the data needs of relevant fields.

This study utilized the accumulation of environmental stress data and extracellular vesicle data from the Environmental Health Theme Database, as well as the data accumulation of species information and species cooperation from the China Animal Theme Database, to develop an extracellular vesicle database. The database collected, integrated, and displayed over 1400 interaction events mediated by extracellular vesicles, covering four functional molecules: proteins, lipids, DNA, RNA, 213 organisms, and 46 tissues/organs.

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