Abstract
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are cell-to-cell shuttles that have recently drawn interest both as drug delivery platforms and disease biomarkers. Despite the increasingly recognized relevance of these vesicles, their detection, and characterization still have several technical drawbacks. In this paper, we accurately assess the size distribution and concentration of EVs by using a high-throughput non-perturbative technique such as Dynamic Light Scattering (DLS). The vesicle radii distribution, as further confirmed by Atomic Force Microscopy experiments, ranges from 10 to 80 nm and appears very asymmetric towards larger radii with a main peak at roughly 30 nm. By combining DLS and Bradford assay, we also demonstrate the feasibility of recovering the concentration and its distribution of proteins contained inside vesicles. The sensitivity of our approach allows to detect protein concentrations as low as 0.01 mg/ml.
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Acknowledgments
This research has been supported by Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Rome. Measurements were performed at the Laboratorio Centralizzato di Microscopia ottica ed elettronica facility (LABCEMI) of Università Cattolica del S. Cuore (Rome, Italy). We are extremely thankful to Mario Amici for the technical support in experiments.
The authors declare no commercial or financial conflict of interest.
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Palmieri, V., Lucchetti, D., Gatto, I. et al. Dynamic light scattering for the characterization and counting of extracellular vesicles: a powerful noninvasive tool. J Nanopart Res 16, 2583 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-014-2583-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11051-014-2583-z