Dear Sara, 

One of the most important differences between serum and plasma is that coagulation releases leukocytes genome DNA to serum altering its composition. It does not happen or is minimized if your are using EDTA-plasma. So, for cell-free DNA analysis EDTA-plasma is recommended because this specimen reflects better the in vivo status. Regarding exosomes, I am not sure if the extra genomic DNA found in serum would interfere in your conclusions, but as the nucleic acids found in serum does not reflect the in vivo status I would suggest to you the use of EDTA-plasma. 

Thank you Gustavo

Ciao Sara,

EDTA- plasma Is highly recommended for extraction of microvesicles and exosomes. and I recommend also  Nanosight for characterization of those nanoparticles.  

Good luck

Thank you Mohammad 

Regarding exosomes using serum or plasma both is ok. Because we didn't find any significant differences between both of them.

Thank you!!

Hello Netrapal Singh ,

How much starting volume of serum/plasma do you start with to isolate exosomes? Because I suspect that after the first round of 100,000xg spin,resuspending in PBS and doing a second round of 100000xg will result in a huge loss of final exosomes, unless you start with a very huge amount of starting material (serum/plasma). Please let me know the amount of your input volume and that would be great!

Netrapal Singh

Thank you very much for your reply. I have always used 1 ml of serum or even lesser to isolate exosomes using Ultracentrifugation, although higher volumes are always beneficial for which I did not have an access to. Do you have any suggestions on using serum (vs) plasma? Although many papers have suggested no particular differences, some papers have indicated serum to have clotting factors that can affect the exosome yield. Please let me know your inputs.

Thank you so much for your valuable recommendations and suggestions. Sharing lab experiences is the only way to enrich our knowledge in order to improve.

I would appreciate to know if someone has ever used EDTA Aprotinin tubs for the extraction of microvesicles and exosomes.

Thank you in advance.

Sara Franceschi

I am curious to know: did you isolate the EVs using UC or commercial kits? And if it was kits, which one was successful for you?