Table 2.

Advantages and drawbacks of several methods for extracting MVs.

Name	Time consumption	Advantages	Drawbacks	Ref
Ultracentrifugation	140–600 min	Low cost, few reagents and consumables, high volume of specimens, no additional chemicals.	High equipment requirements, operational complexity and time, contamination of the finished product (presence of protein aggregates, apoptotic vesicles and other particles), low RNA yields, vesicles can be damaged; efficiency is influenced by rotor type, force magnitude, and sample viscosity.	Momen-Heravi et al. (2013), Livshits et al. (2015), Bryzgunova et al. (2016) and Patel et al. (2019)
Density gradient ultracentrifugation	250 min-2 day	Pure formulation; no viral particle contamination after centrifugation of iododiol; no additional chemicals.	Small capacity, complex, laborious and time-consuming, expensive equipment, samples can be lost, contamination of viral particles in sucrose density gradient method, long procedure time, low yield.	Van Deun et al. (2014), Greening et al. (2015), Lobb et al. (2015) and Abramowicz et al. (2016)
Ultrafiltration	130 min	Simple procedure, allowing simultaneous processing of many samples; pure formulations; additional chemicals; no limitations on sample volume.	Filter clogging, sample loss (large size vesicle rupture), protein contamination, vesicle deformation, small amounts of exosomal proteins.	Salih et al. (2014), Lobb et al. (2015) and Taylor and Shah (2015)
Size-exclusive Chromatography	1 mL/min	High purity; maintains vesicle integrity; high sensitivity with no loss; prevents MV aggregation; no additional chemicals.	Specialized equipment; complex operation; no more than one sample processed in each process; high cost.	Boing et al. (2014), Lobb et al. (2015), Nordin et al. (2015) and Taylor and Shah (2015)
Hydrophilic polymer precipitation	65 min	Simple cost and process; maintains MV integrity; no additional equipment required.	Contamination of polymers, potential for co-precipitation of other non-vesicular contaminants.	Andreu et al. (2016) and Gamez-Valero et al. (2016)