Highlights of the mini-symposium on extracellular vesicles in inter-organismal communication, held in Munich, Germany, August 2018.

All living organisms secrete molecules for intercellular communication. Recent research has revealed that extracellular vesicles (EVs) play an important role in inter-organismal cell-to-cell communication by transporting diverse messenger molecules, including RNA, DNA, lipids and proteins. These discoveries have raised fundamental questions regarding EV biology. How are EVs biosynthesized and loaded with messenger/cargo molecules? How are EVs secreted into the extracellular matrix? What are the EV uptake mechanisms of recipient cells? As EVs are produced by all kind of organisms, from unicellular bacteria and protists, filamentous fungi and oomycetes, to complex multicellular life forms such as plants and animals, basic research in diverse model systems is urgently needed to shed light on the multifaceted biology of EVs and their role in inter-organismal communications. To help catalyse progress in this emerging field, a mini-symposium was held in Munich, Germany in August 2018. This report highlights recent progress and major questions being pursued across a very diverse group of model systems, all united by the question of how EVs contribute to inter-organismal communication.

GeConT 2: gene context analysis for orthologous proteins, conserved domains and metabolic pathways.

The Gene Context Tool (GeConT) allows users to visualize the genomic context of a gene or a group of genes and their orthologous relationships within fully sequenced bacterial genomes. The new version of the server incorporates information from the COG, Pfam and KEGG databases, allowing users to have an integrated graphical representation of the function of genes at multiple levels, their phylogenetic distribution and their genomic context. The sequence of any of the genes can be easily retrieved, as well as the 5' or 3' regulatory regions, greatly facilitating further types of analysis. GeConT 2 is available at: http://bioinfo.ibt.unam.mx/gecont.

GeConT: gene context analysis.

SUMMARY: The fact that adjacent genes in bacteria are often functionally related is widely known. GeConT (Gene Context Tool) is a web interface designed to visualize genome context of a gene or a group of genes and their orthologs in all the completely sequenced genomes. The graphical information of GeConT can be used to analyze genome annotation, functional ortholog identification or to verify the genomic context congruence of any set of genes that share a common property. AVAILABILITY: http://www.ibt.unam.mx/biocomputo/gecont.html