Figure 13.

Extracellular vesicles consist of mainly two types of vesicles with similar physiochemical properties. Extracellular vesicles include exosomes and microvesicles. The main differences between them lie in their subcellular origins. Microvesicles are 50-1000 nm shedding particles from cell membrane; exosomes are 30-150-nm extracellular vesicles originated from endosomes, they are secreted into body fluids through exocytosis after cell membrane and multivesicular body fusion. Due to a lack of effective strategy to separate microvesicle and exosome, it is still difficult to precisely assess their physiochemical properties and functions.