Table 2.

Isolation methods of different extracellular vesicles subtypes.

	Exosomes	Microvesicles	Apoptotic bodies	Oncosomes
Size	40–120 nm	100 nm–1 μm	50 nm–2 μm	1–10 μm
Differential centrifugation and filtration steps	1. 300 × g, 10 min	1. 300 × g, 10 min	1. 300 × g, 10 min	1. 2,800 × g, 10 min
	2. 2,000 × g, 10 min	2. 2,000 × g, 10 min	2. 2,000 × g, 20 min	2. 10,000 × g, 30 min,
	3. Filtration (0.1, 0.22 or 0.8 μm)	3. Filtration 0.8; 1.0 μm (optional)	Comment: Apoptotic bodies are also present in 10,000 and 100,000 × g fractions	Comment: Alternatively filtration through 0.2 μm with centrifugation 30 s, 8000 × g – oncosomes are captured by the filter
	4. 100,000–120,000 × g, 1.5–2 hours	4. 10–20,000 × g, 30 min	(Thery et al. 2001, Crescitelli et al. 2013)	(Morello et al. 2013)
	(Théry et al. 2009, Rani et al. 2011, Tauro et al. 2012)	(Heijnen et al. 1999, Palmisano et al. 2012)
Additional purification	1. Multiple dilutions in PBS and centrifugations 100,000 × g, 70 min
	2. sucrose cushion (Rani et al. 2011)
Fraction in density gradient	1.07–1.18 g/ml	Unspecified	1.24–1.28 g/ml	Unspecified
	(Heijnen et al. 1999, Thery et al. 2001, Keller et al. 2009, Tauro et al. 2012)		(Thery et al. 2001)