Focus on Extracellular Vesicles: Introducing the Next Small Big Thing

By Hina Kalra, G. Drummen, Suresh Mathivanan. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2016

762 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intercellular communication was long thought to be regulated exclusively through direct contact between cells or via release of soluble molecules that transmit the signal by binding to a suitable receptor on the target cell, and/or via uptake into that cell. With the discovery of small secreted vesicular structures that contain complex cargo, both in their lumen and the lipid membrane that surrounds them, a new frontier of signal transduction was discovered. These “extracellular vesicles” (EV) were initially thought to be garbage bags through which the cell ejected its waste. Whilst this is a major function of one type of EV, i.e., apoptotic bodies, many EVs have intricate functions in intercellular communication and compound exchange; although their physiological roles are still ill-defined. Additionally, it is now becoming increasingly clear that EVs mediate disease progression and therefore studying EVs has ignited significant interests among researchers from various fields of life sciences. Consequently, the research effort into the pathogenic roles of EVs is significantly higher even though their protective roles are not well established. The “Focus on extracellular vesicles” series of reviews highlights the current state of the art regarding various topics in EV research, whilst this review serves as an introductory overview of EVs, their biogenesis and molecular composition.

Subfields: Cancer Research, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/928b734f6358d486bee0e5319dd4363d62d21f9b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cancer Research

1. Suresh Mathivanan
2. C. Théry
3. Richard J. Simpson

In Molecular Biology

1. Suresh Mathivanan
2. S. Shaffer
3. Anastasia Khvorova
4. C. Théry
5. Richard J. Simpson
6. Hina Kalra

Citations in the corpus

• Vesiclepedia 2019: a compendium of RNA, proteins, lipids and metabolites in extracellular vesicles (2018, background): “Similarly, the cargo of the apoptotic bodies can be altered based on the stimulus for cell death (1).”
• High-resolution proteomic and lipidomic analysis of exosomes and microvesicles from different cell sources (2016, background): “Commonly enriched pathways in EVs correlated well with previously described behaviours of EVs [such as heparinbinding (46), immune response stimulation (32,47), integrin content (44) and antiphagocytic CD47 (48) of exosomes and mitochondrial, proteasomal and ER content of MVs (16,49)].”