Characterization of exosomes from glioma cells under hypoxia

Abstract: Exosomes are cell-secreted nanosized (30-200 nm) membrane vesicles that contain cytosol proteins and nucleic acids (mRNA, miRNA and mDNA). They have been characterized to be released by most cell types and thus, represent an important part of cell-cell communication. Especially they might play an important role in cell adaptation processes to stress conditions such as hypoxia or oxidative stress. The main difficulty in studying exosomes is however their purification and characterization process which is still a major challenge in the field of exosome research. In this study, we set up the method for isolation of exosomes with differential centrifugation and two characterization techniques nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) and bicinchoninic acid assay (BCA). With the latter techniques we studied whether glioma cells exposed to stress conditions produce more exosomes as communication messengers compared to standard environment. The study so far did not answer this question, our data nevertheless show the initial evidence that exosomes reflect the inner metabolic status of cells.