Fig. 1

Characterization of the EV subpopulations isolated from prostate cell lines. a Representative electron microscopy pictures of microvesicles (MVs) and exosomes (EXOs) isolated from LNCaP, PC-3 and PNT2 cells by differential centrifugation. Scale bars represent 200 nm. b Presence of calnexin (an endoplasmic reticulum marker), flotillin-I, and CD81 (EV markers) analyzed by Western blotting. An equal protein amount of 30 μg was loaded of all the samples. c RNA profiles of MVs and EXOs isolated from LNCaP, PC-3, and PNT2 cells after total RNA extraction. Profiles analyzed by capillary electrophoresis with the Agilent RNA 6000 Nano and Pico Total RNA kits. Representative electropherograms showing in the y-axis fluorescence units (FU) and in the x-axis the nucleotide length (nt) of the RNA. Peaks at 25 nt represent internal standards and peaks at 2,000 nt and 4000 nt represent ribosomal RNA 18 and 28 subunits, respectively. The panels A-C are representative of 3 independent experiments showing the same trends of vesicle morphology, size, and presence of the selected markers