Pyrrhus
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For those of you wondering what the difference is between an "exosome" and an "extracellular vesicle":
- A "vesicle" is like a bubble. It is surrounded by a fatty membrane and is filled with water and other things.
- An "extracellular vesicle" is any vesicle that is found outside a cell.
- An "exosome" is a special type of extracellular vesicle derived from an "endosome".
I recently found this review paper from the great Karla Kierkegaard:
Escape of non-enveloped virus from intact cells (Bird and Kierkegaard, 2015)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25890822/
Among other things, it discusses how enteroviruses encase themselves inside intracellular vesicles which then exit the cell as extracellular vesicles.
These extracellular vesicles containing enteroviruses are not exosomes, and appear to have sizes roughly from 40-800nm.
Well, this is interesting.
In addition to enteroviruses using the larger type of extracellular vesicles, here's a publication that found enteroviruses inside smaller-sized exosomes:
Exosomes cloak the virion to transmit Enterovirus 71 non-lytically (Gu et al., 2019)
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21505594.2019.1705022
Excerpt:
Gu et al 2019 said:Enterovirus 71 (EV71) is a non-enveloped virus and it can be released from host cells through a traditional cytolytic manner. Now, we showed EV71 could be spread non-lytically between cells during early viral infection.
In order to explain this phenomenon, we separated supernatant fluids of rhabdomyosarcoma (RD) cells cultures infected with EV71 by isopycnic gradient centrifugation. Two populations of virus particles were morphology indistinguishable by transmission electron microscope (TEM).
It showed that some EV71 particles were wrapped inside extracellular vesicles which were verified to be exosomes by immunoassay and morphologic analysis. In addition, exosomes containing viral RNA were shed in plasma of EV71-infected encephalitis in children. Our findings indicate that the “non-enveloped” EV71 virions could be wrapped within exosomes which promote their spread in the absence of cell lysis.
[...]
Notably, two populations showed different morphologies. The population at high density (1.18–1.26 g cm−3) contained plentiful 27–30 nm EV71 particles (d in Figure 2(b)). The population at a low density (1.10–1.12 g cm−3) contained some 30–150 nm vesicles (a-c in Figure 2(b)) wrapping between one and four virus-like particles with morphology similar to 27–30 nm EV71 particles in dense fractions (d in Figure 2(b)), and besides empty exosomes, the distribution of the number of virion-like particles inside one vesicle is shown in Figure 2(c).
Furthermore, Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA) revealed these vesicles with low density (1.10–1.12 g cm-3), with diameter concentrated on the size of 101.8 nm (Figure 2(d)), which was consistent with exosomes in dimension. Besides, exosomes markers CD63 and TSG101 and viral protein VP1 could be detected in these vesicles by immunoblots, while albumin and calnexin(CANX) as a negative control to confirm no cell debris in exosomes preparation (Figure 2(e)). These results suggested that EV71 virions were wrapped within exosomes in the supernatant fluids of EV71-infected RD cells.
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