Advances in exosome isolation methods and their applications in proteomic analysis of biological samples.

Exosomes are membrane-bound vesicles secreted by cells, and contain various important biological molecules, such as lipids, proteins, messenger RNAs, microRNAs, and noncoding RNAs. Emerging evidence demonstrates that proteomic analysis of exosomes is of great significance in studying metabolic diseases, tumor metastasis, immune regulation, and so forth. However, exosome proteomic analysis has high requirements with regard to the purity of collected exosomes. Here recent advances in the methods for isolating exosomes and their applications in proteomic analysis are summarized. Graphical abstract.