Table 1.

Isolation and detection methods of different EV subtypes.

EV subtypes	Size range	Biogenesis	Isolation	Detection
Exosomes (Exo) (Théry et al., 2006, 2018; Raposo and Stoorvogel, 2013; Yáñez et al., 2015; Kowal et al., 2016; Willms et al., 2018; Jeppesen et al., 2019)	30–100 nm	Release by exocytosis of multivesicular bodies (MVBs)	Differential centrifugation and density gradients (100,000–200,000 × g), immunoprecipitation, commercial kit, size exclusion chromatography	TEM, AFM, NTA, TRPS, DLS, WB, flow cytometry (bead coupled), ELISA
Microvesicles (MVs) (Lötvall et al., 2014; Cocucci and Meldolesi, 2015; Kowal et al., 2016; Szatanek et al., 2017; Chiriacò et al., 2018; Crescitelli et al., 2020)	100–1,000 nm	Direct budding of the cell membrane	Differential centrifugation (10,000–20,000 × g) Density gradients	TEM, AFM, WB, flow cytometry (for vesicles >300 nm)
Apoptotic bodies (Wickman et al., 2012; Atkin-Smith et al., 2015; Xu et al., 2019)	500–5 μm	Outward blebbing and fragmentation of the cell membrane	Centrifugation, filtration	TEM, IF, flow cytometry

TEM, transmission electron microscopy; AFM, atomic force microscope; NTA, nanoparticle tracking analysis; TRPS, tunable resistive pulse sensing; DLS, dynamic light scattering; IF, immunofluorescence microscopy; ELISA, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay; WB, western blotting.