Extracellular vesicles

E xtracellular vesicles or shortly just EVs, like cells, are tiny vessels confined by biomembranes, only that they are much smaller - thousands or even million times smaller in volume than human cells and even smaller, than the smallest bacteria. Differently from the cells EVs are not living, they do not grow and make their own offsprings. Instead, they are produced and released by cells. But why do cells are making these EVs? Not long ago, when EVs were discovered, they were thought to be just some cellular garbage. This view, however, has changed and we have come to understand EVs have function and purpose. They are like tiny chemical postal envelopes used by cells to communicate with each other. They can have proteins on the surface acting as address field helping to be picked up by different kind of cells and some internal messages in form of molecules like proteins or nucleic acids. How this all works, is still far from being well understood, but surely EVs are involved in both health and disease. As they are so tiny, EVs are not so easy to study and to understand, but with new technologies being developed we are also learning more and more about their role in biology and in our health.

I am interested about how we can use the microfluidic technologies with biomembrane science to capture and analyze these little chemical messengers and, so we could use them, for example, to develop new diagnostic methods and tools.

Figure: Artistic view of different EVs being released by cells and traveling through blood flow to other distant cells carrying them messages.