Figure 2.

Loading of mitochondrial components in Extracellular Vesicles. Exosomes are small vesicles from 50 to 150 nm with an endocytic origin. The inward budding of late endosomes or multivesicular bodies (MVB) forms intraluminal vesicles that are released into the extracellular environment as exosomes through fusion of the MVB with the plasma membrane. Microvesicles, also called ectosomes, shed directly from plasma membrane and are very heterogeneous in size and composition. Apoptotic bodies are larger than 1 μm and are released by apoptotic cells that shed parts of their cytoplasm and organelles surrounded by plasma membrane (Mittelbrunn and Sánchez-Madrid, 2012). Extracellular vesicles can contain mitochondrial fragments which include mitochondrial proteins and mtDNA (depicted in yellow and orange). Bigger particles can be loaded with full functional mitochondria (Phinney et al., 2015).