Course Overview
A rapidly increasing number of researchers aim to purify and identify extracellular vesicles and many methodologies to isolate and analyse these vesicles are available and have been implemented. This course will cover the basics, possibilities and limitations of different purification and characterization techniques and will address strategies to understand their role in biomedical applications.
Audience
This course is intended for PhD students and Postdoctoral researchers who are interested in learning how to work with extracellular vesicles and know more about their biomedical applications.
Modules/Resources
- Extracellular vesicles (continuous and discontinuous density gradient ultracentrifugation, ultrafiltration techniques, bead-capture and precipitation techniques)
- Extracellular vesicles characterisation (Immunoblot and electron microscopy, fluorescent labeling, quantitative and qualitative analysis by flow cytometry, structural and mechanical characterisation by atomic force microscopy, nanoparticle tracking analysis)
- Extracellular vesicles composition (lipidomics, proteomics, transcriptomics)
- Extracellular vesicles and function (molecular players for extracellular vesicle biogenesis, extracellular vesicle targeting to cells, extracellular vesicles as diagnostics and/or therapeutics in pathophysiology)
Learning Outcomes
In this course we intend to make PhD students and post-doctoral researchers familiar with good-practice-guidelines and methods for purification and identification of extracellular vesicles with practical sessions included.
