Brain Tissue Exosome Research and Application

Existing studies have shown that exosomes play a role in the progression of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease. To date, most studies on the role of exosomes in disease progression have relied on exosomes derived from cell supernatant sources or body fluid sources in vitro. However, exosomes from a single cell cannot truly reflect the communication and function of exosomes among various cells in brain tissue. Although exosomes can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, exosomes entering the circulatory system from the brain region are mixed with exosomes from other tissues. Therefore, exosome analysis of plasma or plasma may not truly reflect the state of brain disease. In addition, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is a colorless and transparent liquid that exists in the ventricle and subarachnoid space. However, since brain tissue is an extremely complex structure, it has multiple partitions that perform different functions. And there is also a permeable barrier between the CSF and the brain. Therefore, CSF-derived exosomes cannot fully represent the microenvironmental changes in specific brain subregions.

Excitingly, exosomes exist in the interstitial space of brain tissue, and many research groups have successfully extracted tissue exosomes within specific brain subregions and proposed significant markers or mechanisms of exosomes in brain diseases. Creative Biolabs has been paying attention to research progress about exosome treatment and exosome-based liquid biopsy for nervous system diseases and can provide customers with brain tissue exosome isolation and identification services, downstream exosome profiling services, exosome proteomics services, exosome RNA sequencing services, exosome lipidomics and metabolomics services, and in vivo and in vitro functional verification services for tissue exosomes.

Research Methods of Brain Tissue Exosome

A research team isolated extracellular vesicles (EVs) from brain frontal cortex frozen tissues of AD patients through digestion, ultracentrifugation and sucrose density gradient centrifugation and discovered AD marker protein Tau is enriched in extracellular vesicles of these brain tissues. Because exosomes are the media of material exchange between cells in tissues. Therefore, the research team found that EVs derived from AD brain tissue can inactivate GABAergic neurons and promote the progression of AD by transporting Tau through EVs co-culture experiments in vitro and EVs injection experiments in vivo. Extracting exosomes from brain tissue can not only better study the real transportation mechanism of exosomes in vivo, but also screen out more specific and authentic disease markers in body fluid exosomes in combination with body fluid exosome profiling. Through the combined analysis of miRNA sequencing of chronic methamphetamine-treated rat brain tissue EVs and body fluid EVs and subsequent qPCR verification, researchers found that miR-29a is highly expressed in brain tissue-derived EVs. Subsequently, through in vitro functional tests, it was found that miR-29a is selectively loaded into brain tissue-derived EVs and participated in the process of promoting nerve cell injury. In addition, brain tissue exosomes and single-cell transcriptomics and proteomics sequencing in brain tissue also help to find the traceability of exosomes.

Fig. 1 Neuronal uptake, tau transfer efficiency and tau seeding activities of human brain-derived EVs. (Ruan, 2021)

At present, different research groups have extracted EVs or exosomes from brain frontal cortex tissue, cerebral cortex tissue, brain hippocampus tissue, cerebral cortical gray matter tissue, half brain tissue, and whole brain tissue, and found the communication mechanism and key molecules inside these vesicles. However, it is still puzzling to use what brain region to exosomes to study what diseases. Creative Biolabs has always been a professional exosome technology service provider. Through continuous talent reserve, equipment upgrades, and knowledge updates, we have developed a set of tissue exosome extraction technology. If you also want to study the function of brain tissue exosomes or discover disease markers inside brain tissue exosomes, please contact us to express your specific ideas. We are willing to work with you to explore the mysteries of brain tissue exosomes and discover the differences of tissue exosomes in different brain regions, so as to promote the application of brain tissue exosomes.

Reference

Ruan, Z.; Pathak, D.; et al. Alzheimer's disease brain-derived extracellular vesicles spread tau pathology in interneurons. Brain. 2021. 144(1):288-309.

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