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Updated: Aug 2, 2025
Author Spotlight: Advancing EVtrap for High-Throughput Proteomics in Disease Biomarker Discovery
Published on: October 27, 2023
Reversible zwitterionic coordination enables rapid, high-yield, and high-purity isolation of extracellular vesicles
Qiang Li1, Zhaowei Zhang1, Fengchao Wang1
1State Key Laboratory of Medicinal Chemical Biology, Research Center for Analytical Sciences, Tianjin Key Laboratory of Molecular Recognition and Biosensing, and Frontiers Science Center for New Organic Matter, College of Chemistry, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China.
Abstract:
Extracellular vesicles (EVs) hold great clinical value as promising diagnostic biomarkers and therapeutic agents. This field, however, is hindered by technical challenges in the isolation of EVs from biofluids for downstream purposes. We here report a rapid (<30 min) isolation method for EV extraction from diverse biofluids with yield and purity exceeding 90%. These high performances are ascribed to the reversible zwitterionic coordination between the phosphatidylcholine (PC) on EV membranes and the "PC-inverse" choline phosphate (CP) decorated on magnetic beads. By coupling this isolation method with proteomics, a set of differentially expressed proteins on the EVs were identified as potential colon cancer biomarkers. Last, we demonstrated that the EVs in various clinically relevant biofluids, such as blood serum, urine, and saliva, can also be isolated efficiently, outperforming the conventional approaches in terms of simplicity, speed, yield, and purity.
