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. 2019 Aug 13;18:124. doi: 10.1186/s12943-019-1049-4

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© The Author(s). 2019

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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Fig. 1 — a. The biogenesis of exosomes and the mechanisms involved in intercellular communication. The exosome is an intraluminal vesicle (ILV) formed by the inward budding of the endosomal membrane during the maturation of the multivesicular endosomes (MVEs) and then secreted after fusing with the cell surface. Uptake by recipient cells occurs via a three step processes: 1. membrane fusion with target cells; 2. endocytosis; 3. activation of surface receptors and signaling. b. Schematic diagram of the exosome. The exosome is a disk-shaped membranous vesicle with a diameter 30–100 nm, and carries a parental cell cargo including lipids, metabolites, proteins, nucleic acids (DNA fragments, mRNA, miRNA, etc.)