Extracellular Vesicles (EVs) as well as other nanoparticles (NPs), are promising actors for disease diagnosis and treatment. EVs are heterogeneous membrane-enclosed nanoparticles released by all cells to transfer information (proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids) to other cells. EVs’ specific role depends on their size and their cargo; hence the characterization of EVs’ structural and biochemical features is essential to understand their diagnostic and/or prognostic potential. Because the vast majority of EVs are too small for the resolutive power of conventional optical microscopes, Single Molecule Localization Microscopy is perfectly suitable to characterize EVs and NPs from various origin to obtain more information that will be key to use them as powerful tools for diagnosis and therapy for cancer and many other diseases.
SMLM is a powerful technique when applied to EV analysis due to its high spatial resolution. Detecting more than thousands of EVs in a single field of view, thanks to the Abbelight’s ASTER technique, helps in characterization and statistical analysis of EVs rapidly. Abbelight Ultimate 3D imaging is an additional powerful feature which allows to better characterize EVs shape to achieve full understanding of subpopulations.
