The impact of disparate isolation methods for extracellular vesicles on downstream RNA profiling

TLDR

Extracellular vesicles, including exosomes, are of great interest as cancer biomarkers, yet no consensus exists on reliable isolation protocols. The study compares four exosome isolation protocols to evaluate their usability, yield, and purity for biomarker discovery. The authors assess each protocol’s performance by measuring usability, yield, purity, and downstream omics impact. OptiPrep density gradient centrifugation produced the purest exosome fractions, yielding the highest CD63‑positive vesicles, enriched exosomal markers, and a distinct mRNA profile enriched in translation, ribosome, mitochondrion, and nuclear lumen functions, demonstrating that high‑purity isolation is essential for reliable omics data and biomarker identification.

Abstract

Despite an enormous interest in the role of extracellular vesicles, including exosomes, in cancer and their use as biomarkers for diagnosis, prognosis, drug response and recurrence, there is no consensus on dependable isolation protocols. We provide a comparative evaluation of 4 exosome isolation protocols for their usability, yield and purity, and their impact on downstream omics approaches for biomarker discovery. OptiPrep density gradient centrifugation outperforms ultracentrifugation and ExoQuick and Total Exosome Isolation precipitation in terms of purity, as illustrated by the highest number of CD63-positive nanovesicles, the highest enrichment in exosomal marker proteins and a lack of contaminating proteins such as extracellular Argonaute-2 complexes. The purest exosome fractions reveal a unique mRNA profile enriched for translation, ribosome, mitochondrion and nuclear lumen function. Our results demonstrate that implementation of high purification techniques is a prerequisite to obtain reliable omics data and identify exosome-specific functions and biomarkers.