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. 2021 Jan 27;20:22. doi: 10.1186/s12943-021-01312-y

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© The Author(s) 2021

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.

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Fig. 2 — Typical structure, biological properties and functions of exosomes. Exosomes (size range ~40 to 160 nm) are extracellular vesicles generated by all cells. Exosomes can contain different types of cell surface proteins, intracellular protein, RNA, DNA, amino acids, and metabolites. Exosome surface proteins include tetraspanins, integrins, immunomodulatory proteins, and more. Several molecules are used as exosome markers (CD9, CD81, CD63, TSG101, ceramide, and Alix). Exosomes can be a highly heterogeneous population with pleiotropic functions. They are mediators of near and long-distance intercellular communication in health and disease and affect various aspects of cell biology.