Exosome Capture from Fresh Human Plasma
This data is from about a month ago and it something that Jim has been asking me to put up, so here it finally is. When Tejas runs his experiments, he usually leaves me the last mL of blood that he has from his draw in case I want to do anything with it. One time, I just thought that I would give it a shot and run his plasma and try to capture exosomes. I didn’t do any treatment other than a quick spin to make sure I wasn’t getting any red cells. Then I ran it over the membrane in tangential flow in my usual way. The results were a bit interesting. Firstly, due to the high protein concentration, the membrane snapped, leaving me with only the pieces by the sides of the window. When I imaged the sample, the first thing that I saw were a whole lot of salt crystals and a layer of protein on the membrane (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Salt crystals from Tejas’s plasma and a thick layer of protein on the membrane.
This kind of made me a bit suspicious as to whether I would see anything useful, but I moved to the region by the exit of the flow. There was again a thick layer of protein on the membrane, but there were also particles that appeared to be carbon based that had flattened out under the layer of protein. They were in the size range of exosomes, but I can’t say for sure that they are. Here are the pictures so that you can speculate for yourselves.
