Secreted RNAs leave the intracellular environment by associating with diverse vesicular and protein components. Secreted vesicles are heterogeneous and follow various routes of egress from the cell (1). Subclasses of such vesicles contain distinct cell surface proteins (2). In order to fully understand the diversity of vesicles that contain RNA, it is necessary to analyze and sort vesicle populations (3). One way to do this is by flow sorting such vesicles based on the presence of distinct vesicular surface proteins.
The ability to perform flow cytometric analysis and sorting of exosomes has been an ongoing area of controversy due to the small size of exosomes, which range in size from 40-130nm, near or below the diffraction limit of light. Nevertheless, a variety of groups have used this technique to analyze different subsets of small vesicles successfully (4-14), including proteomic analyses (4, 15-17). The efficacy of these flow-sorting experiments has been cross-validated by a variety of means, including western blots and co-localization of coincidently expressed factors. Fluorescence-Activated Vesicle Sorting (FAVS) uses light scattering properties of vesicles to analyze and sort individual exosomes using fluorescent labels. (See a previous blog on FAVS here.)
In the paper, “Identification and Characterization of EGF Receptor in Individual Exosomes by Fluorescence-Activated Vesicle Sorting (FAVS)”, published in the Journal of Extracellular Vesicles (JEV), Higginbotham and colleagues have used FAVS to analyze exosomal subsets that express varying amounts of EGFR in different cell-culture and in vivo contexts. This was done using DiFi cells, a human colorectal cancer (CRC) cell line, and A431, an epidermoid cancer cell line, which express approximately 5×106 and 2.5×106 EGFRs per cell, respectively (18, 19). The FAVS results showed that DiFi exosomes contain far more EGFR than do A431 exosomes, far exceeding the two-fold difference in EGFR levels present in these cell lines. Furthermore, using an antibody that recognizes an active form of EGFR, mAb806 (20-22), the amount of active EGFR was also found to be dramatically higher in DiFi exosomes than in A431 exosomes.
FAVS was also used to sort EGFR/CD9 double-positive and double-negative exosome populations, allowing enrichment of both subsets by post-sort analysis as well as western blot validation of the sorted exosomes (see Figure). Using human-specific reagents, FAVS was able to detect DiFi exosomes in the plasma of mice bearing DiFi xenografts. FAVS was also used to demonstrate that EGFR and one of its ligands, amphiregulin (AREG) are present in the plasma of normal individuals.
Results from the JEV paper derived from Fig 2. DiFi exosomes were flow sorted using antibodies to EGFR and CD9. Sorted purified double-negative vesicles (blue box/arrow) and double-positive vesicles (red box/arrow) were probed by western blot for markers as shown. These results validate the flow sorting enrichment of these different classes of vesicles. Also shown is a STORM image of an individual flow sorted double-positive vesicle.
This work joins flow-sorting work done by other labs using somewhat different techniques (6-14) and has implications for similar kinds of work done by other members of this consortium (23-25). Common to all these techniques was the use of lipid and/or specific extracellular vesicle markers to identify classes of secreted vesicles. Unlike FAVS, many sorting methods trigger vesicular events based on fluorescence rather than scatter. In all of these cases, analysis of secreted vesicle populations was performed. In some cases vesicle sorting was also achieved.
Thus, FAVS appears to be a promising technique to identify and purify distinct subsets of exosomes for discovery studies. It also holds promise for the detection of biomarkers in disease states including subsets of associated secreted RNAs.
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