TABLE 1.

Characteristics and biogenesis of different extracellular vesicles (EVs).

	EV typea	Sizea	Origina	Referencesa
Archaeal EVs (AEVs)	Crenarchaeotal AEVs (C-AEVs)	90–230 nm	Archaeal ESCRT machinery	Liu et al., 2021a
	Euryarchaeotal AEVs (E-AEVs)	50–150 nm	Budding of the cell membrane	Liu et al., 2021a
Bacterial EVs (BEVs)	Outer membrane vesicles (OMVs)	20–300 nm	Blebbing of the outer membrane of gram negative bacteria	Díaz-Garrido et al., 2021a
	Outer-inner membrane vesicles (O-IMVs)	60–160 nm	Blebbing of the inner and outer membrane of gram negative bacteria	Pérez-Cruz et al., 2015
	Explosive outer membrane vesicles (E-OMVs)	110–800 nm	Phage-mediated cell lysis of gram negative bacteria	Turnbull et al., 2016; Toyofuku et al., 2017
	Cytoplasmic membrane vesicles (CMVs)	20–400 nm	Budding or extrusion of the cell membrane and release through cell wall pores or holes of gram-positive bacteria	Toyofuku et al., 2019; Briaud and Carroll, 2020
Traditional subtypes of eukaryotic EVs	Exosomes	30–150 nm	Released by multi-vesicular bodies fusing with plasma membrane	Joffe et al., 2016
	Microvesicles	100–1,000 nm	Outward budding of the plasma membrane	Joffe et al., 2016
	Apoptotic bodies	800–1,000 nm	Programmed cell death	Joffe et al., 2016
Additional subtypes of EVs in plants	Tetraspanin-positive EVs	Unclearb	Released by multi-vesicular bodies fusing with plasma membrane	Cai et al., 2018
	Penetration1-positive EVs	Unclear	Unclear	Rutter and Innes, 2017
	Exocyst-positive organelle-derived EVs	200–500 nm	Unclear	Wang et al., 2010
	Pollensomes	28–60 nm	Pollen-released secretory nanovesicles	Prado et al., 2014

^aDetails in each column (from left to right) describe: the classes of EVs, the size range of EVs, the biogenesis mechanism of EVs, and the primary literature references.

^bPublished data do not provide a clear answer.