Abstract
Intercellular communication is vital to ensure tissue and organism homeostasis and can occur directly, between neighbour cells via gap junctions (GJ), or indirectly, at longer distances, through extracellular vesicles, including exosomes. Exosomes, as intercellular carriers of messenger molecules, mediate the transfer of biological information between donor and acceptor cells. Although the biological effects of exosomes in target cells have been intensively studied, the mechanisms that govern exosomal uptake are not fully understood. Here, we show that Connexin 43 (Cx43), the most widely expressed GJ protein, is present in exosomes in the form of hexameric channels and, more importantly, that exosomal Cx43 is able to modulate the interaction and transfer of information between exosomes and acceptor cells. This study envisions a new paradigm where Cx43-containing channels mediate the release of exosomal content into cells, which constitutes a novel and unanticipated mechanism to modulate intercellular communication.
Highlights
Intercellular communication is vital to ensure tissue and organism homeostasis and can occur directly, between neighbour cells via gap junctions (GJ), or indirectly, at longer distances, through extracellular vesicles, including exosomes
Given the lack of consensus in the literature regarding the nomenclature adopted to refer to the different extracellular vesicles (EVs), it should be noted that when using the term exosomes, these may represent a larger set of EVs
To further confirm that the isolation procedure employed gave rise to a vesicle population highly enriched in exosomes, we used nanosight tracking analysis (NTA) to assess the size of the vesicles and Western Blot (WB) to evaluate the presence of exosomal markers
Summary
Intercellular communication is vital to ensure tissue and organism homeostasis and can occur directly, between neighbour cells via gap junctions (GJ), or indirectly, at longer distances, through extracellular vesicles, including exosomes. We show that Connexin 43 (Cx43), the most widely expressed GJ protein, is present in exosomes in the form of hexameric channels and, more importantly, that exosomal Cx43 is able to modulate the interaction and transfer of information between exosomes and acceptor cells. Cx43, the most widely expressed Cx, oligomerizes into hexameric channels in the ER which are subsequently transported to the plasma membrane, where they dock with opposing hemichannels of neighbour cells to form GJ plaques, through which intercellular communication occurs. This communication can be regulated at different levels, namely channel gating, Cx43 synthesis, trafficking and degradation[13]. Our data ascribes a novel and unanticipated biological role for Cx43 in mediating the transfer of information between exosomes and acceptor cells
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