Dataset Information

ExtraPEG: A Polyethylene Glycol-Based Method for Enrichment of Extracellular Vesicles.

ABSTRACT: Initially thought to be a means for cells to eliminate waste, secreted extracellular vesicles, known as exosomes, are now understood to mediate numerous healthy and pathological processes. Though abundant in biological fluids, purifying exosomes has been challenging because their biophysical properties overlap with other secreted cell products. Easy-to-use commercial kits for harvesting exosomes are now widely used, but the relative low-purity and high-cost of the preparations restricts their utility. Here we describe a method for purifying exosomes and other extracellular vesicles by adapting methods for isolating viruses using polyethylene glycol. This technique, called ExtraPEG, enriches exosomes from large volumes of media rapidly and inexpensively using low-speed centrifugation, followed by a single small-volume ultracentrifugation purification step. Total protein and RNA harvested from vesicles is sufficient in quantity and quality for proteomics and sequencing analyses, demonstrating the utility of this method for biomarker discovery and diagnostics. Additionally, confocal microscopy studies suggest that the biological activity of vesicles is not impaired. The ExtraPEG method can be easily adapted to enrich for different vesicle populations, or as an efficient precursor to subsequent purification techniques, providing a means to harvest exosomes from many different biological fluids and for a wide variety of purposes.

SUBMITTER: Rider MA

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4828635 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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ExtraPEG: A Polyethylene Glycol-Based Method for Enrichment of Extracellular Vesicles.

Rider Mark A MA Hurwitz Stephanie N SN Meckes David G DG

Scientific reports 20160412

Initially thought to be a means for cells to eliminate waste, secreted extracellular vesicles, known as exosomes, are now understood to mediate numerous healthy and pathological processes. Though abundant in biological fluids, purifying exosomes has been challenging because their biophysical properties overlap with other secreted cell products. Easy-to-use commercial kits for harvesting exosomes are now widely used, but the relative low-purity and high-cost of the preparations restricts their ut ...[more]

PMID: 27068479

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Project description:Extracellular vesicles (EVs) provide a complex means of intercellular signalling between cells at local and distant sites, both within and between different organs. According to their cell-type specific signatures, EVs can function as a novel class of biomarkers for a variety of diseases, and can be used as drug-delivery vehicles. Furthermore, EVs from certain cell types exert beneficial effects in regenerative medicine and for immune modulation. Several techniques are available to harvest EVs from various body fluids or cell culture supernatants. Classically, differential centrifugation, density gradient centrifugation, size-exclusion chromatography and immunocapturing-based methods are used to harvest EVs from EV-containing liquids. Owing to limitations in the scalability of any of these methods, we designed and optimised a polyethylene glycol (PEG)-based precipitation method to enrich EVs from cell culture supernatants. We demonstrate the reproducibility and scalability of this method and compared its efficacy with more classical EV-harvesting methods. We show that washing of the PEG pellet and the re-precipitation by ultracentrifugation remove a huge proportion of PEG co-precipitated molecules such as bovine serum albumine (BSA). However, supported by the results of the size exclusion chromatography, which revealed a higher purity in terms of particles per milligram protein of the obtained EV samples, PEG-prepared EV samples most likely still contain a certain percentage of other non-EV associated molecules. Since PEG-enriched EVs revealed the same therapeutic activity in an ischemic stroke model than corresponding cells, it is unlikely that such co-purified molecules negatively affect the functional properties of obtained EV samples. In summary, maybe not being the purification method of choice if molecular profiling of pure EV samples is intended, the optimised PEG protocol is a scalable and reproducible method, which can easily be adopted by laboratories equipped with an ultracentrifuge to enrich for functional active EVs.

Dataset Information

ExtraPEG: A Polyethylene Glycol-Based Method for Enrichment of Extracellular Vesicles.

Publications

ExtraPEG: A Polyethylene Glycol-Based Method for Enrichment of Extracellular Vesicles.

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