2025/01/01 by Marija Holcar, Ivica Marić, Tobias Tertel +5 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Medicine · #Extracellular vesicles in disease #Renal Diseases and Glomerulopathies #MicroRNA in disease regulation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/jev2.70039
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Despite immense interest in biomarker applications of extracellular vesicles (EVs) from blood, our understanding of circulating EVs under physiological conditions in healthy humans remains limited. Using imaging and multiplex bead-based flow cytometry, we comprehensively quantified circulating EVs with respect to their cellular origin in a large cohort of healthy blood donors. We assessed coefficients of variations to characterize their biological variation and explored demographic, clinical, and lifestyle factors contributing to observed variation. Cell-specific circulating EV subsets show a wide range of concentrations that do not correlate with cell-of-origin concentrations in blood, suggesting steady-state EV subset concentrations are regulated by complex mechanisms, which differ even for EV subsets from the same cell type. Interestingly, tetraspanin+ circulating EVs largely originate from platelets and to a lesser extent from lymphocytes. Principal component analysis (PCA) and association analyses demonstrate high biological inter-individual variation in circulating EVs across healthy humans, which are only partly explained by the influence of sex, menopausal status, age and smoking on specific circulating EV and/or tetraspanin+ circulating EV subsets. No global influence of the explored subject's factors on circulating EVs was detected. Our findings provide the first comprehensive, quantitative data towards the cell-origin atlas of plasma EVs, with important implications in the clinical use of EVs as biomarkers.