Tangential flow filtration for isolating exomeres and other nanoscale extracellular particles
Thomas Scarborough, Yuki Kawai-Harada, Olivia Brennan, Christina Chan, Masako Harada, S. Patrick Walton · 2026
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Description
Scarborough and co-authors adapt an industrial separation technique to harvest exomeres, in this 2026 study. Exomeres are nanoscale particles cells release. They are smaller than the better-known extracellular vesicles and top carriers of RNA. Slow, costly ultracentrifuge isolation has held back study of them. So the team tried tangential flow filtration, skimming fluid across a membrane to sort particles by size.
Filtration gave exomeres matching centrifuge runs in purity. They were rich in RNA-handling proteins, including Argonaute-2 and a heat shock protein. They carried a distinctive microRNA set not abundant in vesicles. A surprise came next: microRNAs inside exomeres survived nuclease enzymes even after protease and detergent treatment that should strip their shield. They seem unusually stable, with maybe long lives in blood. The authors propose filtration as a scalable way to make exomere-based RNA drugs.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Thomas Scarborough, Yuki Kawai-Harada, Olivia Brennan, Christina Chan, Masako Harada, S. Patrick Walton |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 57 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |