Proteomic insights into extracellular vesicle biology – defining exosomes and shed microvesicles

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are critical mediators of intercellular communication, capable of regulating the transcriptional landscape of target cells through horizontal transmission of biological information, such as proteins, lipids, and RNA species.

This capability highlights their potential as novel targets for disease intervention.

Areas covered: This review focuses on the emerging importance of discovery proteomics (high-throughput, unbiased quantitative protein identification) and targeted proteomics (hypothesis-driven quantitative protein subset analysis) mass spectrometry (MS)-based strategies in EV biology, especially exosomes and shed microvesicles.

Expert commentary: Recent advances in MS hardware, workflows, and informatics provide comprehensive, quantitative protein profiling of EVs and EV-treated target cells. This information is seminal to understanding the role of EV subtypes in cellular crosstalk, especially when integrated with other ‘omics disciplines, such as RNA analysis (e.g., mRNA, ncRNA). Moreover, high-throughput MS-based proteomics promises to provide new avenues in identifying novel markers for detection, monitoring, and therapeutic intervention of disease.

KEYWORDS:

• Extracellular vesicles
• exosomes
• microparticles
• proteomics
• cell communication
• quantitation
• shed microvesicles
• mass spectrometry

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the La Trobe University Comprehensive Proteomics Platform.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported, in part, by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia project grants, grant number 1057741 (R.J. Simpson), La Trobe University Leadership RFA Grant (D.W. Greening and R.J. Simpson), La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science Molecular Biology Stone Fellowship (D.W. Greening), and La Trobe University Start-up Grant (D.W. Greening). R. Xu, S. Gopal, and A. Rai are supported by La Trobe University Post Graduate Scholarships.