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Appropriate and well-documented in vitro cell-culturing systems are necessary to study the activity and biological function of extracellular vesicles (EVs). The aim of this study was to describe an experimental system, in which dynamic, vesicle-based cell communication can be investigated. A commercially available cell-culturing system was applied to study contact-independent cell communication, which separated two cell populations using a membrane with a pore size of 0.4 μm. The EV exchange characteristics between the two compartments in the culture set-up was preliminarily investigated in a cell-free set-up, and analysed using the Extracellular Vesicle (EV) Array and Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis. The application of the cell-culturing set-up was demonstrated using co-cultures of human primary cells. The effects of the relative placement of the two cell populations on the phenotype of EVs found in the cell supernatant were investigated. The results indicate that this placement can be important for the biological hypothesis that is being investigated. These observations are relevant for short (

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are one of several tools that cells use to communicate with each other. This communication is facilitated by a number of surface-associated proteins and the cargo of the vesicles. For several cancer types, the amount of EVs is observed to be up-regulated in patients compared to healthy individuals, possibly signifying the presence of an aberrant process. The hypoxia-induced release of EVs from cancer cells has been hypothesized to cause the malignant transformation of healthy recipient cells. In this study, the phenotype of cells and EVs from the ovarian cancer cell lines, COV504, SKOV3, and Pt4, were quantified and analysed under normoxic and hypoxic conditions. It was shown that both cells and EVs express common markers and that the EV phenotype varies more than the cellular phenotype. Additionally, cells subjected to 24 hours of hypoxia compared to normoxia produced more EVs. The phenotyping of EVs from cancer cell lines provides information about their molecular composition. This information may be translated to knowledge regarding the functionality of EVs and lead to a better understanding of their role in cancer.

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) have a demonstrated involvement in modulating the immune system. It has been proposed that EVs could be used as biomarkers for detection of inflammatory and immunological disorders. Consequently, it is of great interest to investigate EVs in more detail with focus on immunological markers. In this study, five major leukocyte subpopulations and the corresponding leukocyte-derived EVs were phenotyped with focus on selected immunological lineage-specific markers and selected vesicle-related markers. The leukocyte-derived EVs displayed phenotypic differences in the 34 markers investigated. The majority of the lineage-specific markers used for identification of the parent cell types could not be detected on EVs released from monocultures of the associated cell types. In contrast, the vesicular presentation of CD9, CD63, and CD81 correlated to the cell surface expression of these markers, however, with few exceptions. Furthermore, the cellular expression of CD9, CD63, and CD81 varied between leukocytes present in whole blood and cultured leukocytes. In summary, these data demonstrate that the cellular and vesicular presentation of selected lineage-specific and vesicle-related markers may differ, supporting the accumulating observations that sorting of molecular cargo into EVs is tightly controlled.

Appropriate and well-documented in vitro cell-culturing systems are necessary to study the activity and biological function of extracellular vesicles (EVs). The aim of this study was to describe an experimental system, in which dynamic, vesicle-based cell communication can be investi‐ gated. A commercially available cell-culturing system was applied to study contact-independent cell communication, which separated two cell populations using a membrane with a pore size of 0.4 μm. The EV exchange characteristics between the two compartments in the culture set-up was preliminarily investigated in a cell-free set-up, and ana‐ lysed using the Extracellular Vesicle (EV) Array and Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis. The application of the cell- culturing set-up was demonstrated using co-cultures of human primary cells. The effects of the relative placement of the two cell populations on the phenotype of EVs found in the cell supernatant were investigated. The results indicate that this placement can be important for the biological hypothesis that is being investigated. These observations are relevant for short (

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are one of several tools that cells use to communicate with each other. This communication is facilitated by a number of surface-associated proteins and the cargo of the vesicles. For several cancer types, the amount of EVs is observed to be up-regulated in patients com‐ pared to healthy individuals, possibly signifying the presence of an aberrant process. The hypoxia-induced release of EVs from cancer cells has been hypothesized to cause the malignant transformation of healthy recipient cells. In this study, the phenotype of cells and EVs from the ovarian cancer cell lines, COV504, SKOV3, and Pt4, were quantified and analysed under normoxic and hypoxic conditions. It was shown that both cells and EVs express common markers and that the EV phenotype varies more than the cellular phenotype. Additionally, cells subjected to 24 hours of hypoxia compared to normoxia produced more EVs. The phenotyping of EVs from cancer cell lines provides information about their molecular composition. This information may be translated to knowledge regarding the functionality of EVs and lead to a better understanding of their role in cancer.