Protein contaminations impact quantification and functional analysis of extracellular vesicle preparations from mesenchymal stromal cells

Extracellular vesicles (EV) awakened interest in the research on mesenchymal stromal cells by exploring their paracrine effects. However, many isolation protocols use bovine serum albumin (BSA) during the preparation of the EV. Therefore, we produced 'sham' BSA-EV and tested them in comparison to EV derived from mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC-EV). We found that BSA-EV did not express MSC-specific surface markers like CD29 and CD90. However, they were capable of reducing serum-starvation induced apoptosis in vitro in a kidney epithelial cell line to a similar extent as MSC-EV as measured by Annexin V/7-Aminoactinomycin D labeling and flow cytometry.