Nanoalgosomes: Introducing extracellular vesicles produced by microalgae.

Giorgia Adamo,Antonella Cusimano,Veronika Kralj‐Iglič,Sabrina Picciotto,Antonella Bongiovanni,Daniele P Romancino,Pamela Santonicola,Umberto Capasso Palmiero,Rita Carrotta,Elia Di Schiavi,Estella Rao,Fabio Librizzi,Carolina Paganini,Katharina Landfester,Mauro Manno,Paolo Arosio,Darja Božič,Nicolas Touzet,Meiyu Gai,Angela Paterna,Vincenzo Martorana,Rosina Noto,Rachel Parkes,David Fierli,Christopher Stanly,Svenja Morsbach,Anita Aranyos,Giovanna L Liguori,Samuele Raccosta,Annamaria Kisslinger,Loredana Randazzo,Aleš Iglič ,Gabriella Pócsfalvi ,L.a Corcuera ,Maria Elena Barone

doi:10.1002/jev2.12081

Abstract

Cellular, inter‐organismal and cross kingdom communication via extracellular vesicles (EVs) is intensively studied in basic science with high expectation for a large variety of bio‐technological applications. EVs intrinsically possess many attributes of a drug delivery vehicle. Beyond the implications for basic cell biology, academic and industrial interests in EVs have increased in the last few years. Microalgae constitute sustainable and renewable sources of bioactive compounds with a range of sectoral applications, including the formulation of health supplements, cosmetic products and food ingredients. Here we describe a newly discovered subtype of EVs derived from microalgae, which we named nanoalgosomes. We isolated these extracellular nano‐objects from cultures of microalgal strains, including the marine photosynthetic chlorophyte Tetraselmis chuii, using differential ultracentrifugation or tangential flow fractionation and focusing on the nanosized small EVs (sEVs). We explore different biochemical and physical properties and we show that nanoalgosomes are efficiently taken up by mammalian cell lines, confirming the cross kingdom communication potential of EVs. This is the first detailed description of such membranous nanovesicles from microalgae. With respect to EVs isolated from other organisms, nanoalgosomes present several advantages in that microalgae are a renewable and sustainable natural source, which could easily be scalable in terms of nanoalgosome production.

Highlights

Cells communicate with each other and respond to a variety of stimuli by releasing membrane-enclosed vesicles, which are found in extracellular fluids (Yáñez-Mó et al, 2015)
The small EVs (sEVs) yields is based on Extracellular vesicles (EVs) protein concentration, measured by micro-bicinchoninic (BCA) colorimetric assay, and particle numbers (n. sEVs), measured by Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA), both expressed per mg of dry weight microalgal biomass
From the microalgae-conditioned culture media we isolated extracellular by-products, which consist of two EVs subpopulations: nanovesicles and microvesicles

Summary

Introduction

Cells communicate with each other and respond to a variety of stimuli by releasing membrane-enclosed vesicles, which are found in extracellular fluids (Yáñez-Mó et al, 2015). The exploitation of the biotechnological potential of EVs as carriers of bioactive compounds for different theranostic applications is of increasing interest. The growth of this field is evident from the surge in recent years in the number of publications, patents, companies, and clinical trials related to EVs (Kosaka et al, 2019; Shaimardanova et al, 2020; Zipkin, 2019). In the context of better harmonizing research efforts aimed at valorising the potential of EVs, Théry and Witwer et al (2018) recently revised the required parameters for the robust description of EVs (Théry et al, 2018)

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Results

Conclusion