Figure - PMC

Skip to main content

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

Here's how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

View full-text article in PMC

. 2021 Jan 6;11:1. doi: 10.1186/s13578-020-00515-y

Search in PMC
Search in PubMed
View in NLM Catalog
Add to search

© The Author(s) 2020

Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. 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 in a credit line to the data.

PMC Copyright notice

Fig. 1 — a Exosomes are cup/spherical-shaped vesicles (40–150 nm) with a double-layered lipid membrane surrounding a small cytosol without any organelles. This phospholipid bilayer membrane loaded with peripheral and integral proteins. Exosomes also contain nucleic acids (e.g. DNA, mRNAs, microRNAs, and long non-coding RNAs) and lipids. b Exosome biogenesis started via endocytosis pathway and early endosome formation. During this process, the cell membrane components (proteins and etc.) are embedded into the early endosomes’ membrane, which then matured into late endosomes. Inward budding of late endosomal membrane creates multiple intraluminal vesicles (ILVs) within multivesicular endosomes, in which some particular proteins and other cytosolic constituents are enveloped in exosomes under control of ESCRT family. MVBs then fuse with the cell membrane to release their ILVs into extracellular milieu by Rab GTPases 27A and B molecular motors