Extracellular Microvesicles: The Need for Internationally Recognised Nomenclature and Stringent Purification Criteria
Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: Copyright: © 2012 Simpson RJ, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Extracellular microvesicles (eMVs) are a class of membrane bound organelles secreted by various cell types [1]. eMVs include (i) exosomes: 40-100 nm diameter membraneous vesicles of endocytic origin (ii) ectosomes (also referred to as shedding microvesicles, SMVs): large membranous vesicles (50-1000 nm diameter) that are shed directly from the plasma membrane (PM) and (iii) apoptotic blebs (50-5000 nm diameter): released by dying cells. Over the last five years, the field of eMVs has witnessed tremendous growth (more than 3,500 research articles published) mainly due to their purported role in intercellular signaling and possible source of disease biomarkers. Whilst these studies have advanced our understanding of eMVs, two key problems persist that require immediate attention.
DOI: 10.4172/jpb.10000e10
Authors: Richard J. Simpson, Suresh Mathivanan
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2325106937