Question: Can exosomes, synaptosomes and other extracellular vesicles be run in Single cell applications?
Answer: We have not tested exosomes, synaptosomes or other extracellular vesicles in the Single Cell 3' or 5' assays; however, there is no lower size limit that the system can partition into GEMs. The low RNA content per vesicle may be of concern and will require increasing the number of cDNA amplification cycles or additional optimization steps. Additionally, the cell calling algorithm may not be able to accurately distinguish a low RNA content vesicle from the background signal.
Lastly, extracellular vesicles tend to be smaller in size (exosome: 30-100 nm, microvesicles: 100nm - 1um) compared to cells, making them more difficult to visually inspect and/or count before loading onto the system.
Products: Single Cell Gene Expression, Single Cell Immune Profiling