Course Extracellular vesicles – an introduction

The course C283/04 Extracellular vesicles – an introduction is being offered by the Graduate School of Health, Aarhus University, spring 2022.

Criteria for participation: University degree in medicine, dentistry, nursing, or Master’s degree in other fields and/or postgraduate research fellows (PhD students and research-year medical students)

Aim: To provide theoretical knowledge on extracellular vesicles (EV), their role and potential in future therapeutics, and hands-on experience with EV isolation and characterization.

Learning outcomes: After the course, you will be able to:

- Describe EVs, their origin and cargo

- Describe different EV isolation methods and their pros and cons

- Describe the most common characterization techniques for EVs

- Describe how to characterize EV composition

- Discuss what to consider during collection and isolation of EVs from various types of samples

- Discuss how to explore EV function

- Isolate and characterize EVs

Content: In recent years, EVs have been recognized to play an important role in health and disease by trafficking biomolecules between cells. In this way, EVs have been found to be important in disease progression since both diseased cells and pathogens release EVs to facilitate their survival. This also suggests that EVs can be used as diagnostic markers for such conditions. The therapeutic potential of EVs and their use as vaccines are also currently being explored all underpinning the prospects of EV research.

In this course, we will cover basic aspects of EVs, which will include their nomenclature, biogenesis, their release and uptake as well as EV cargos. Different isolations methods will be presented such as ultracentrifugation, size exclusion chromatography and precipitation techniques and their pros and cons discussed. Different methods to identify, characterize and enumerate EVs will be presented and discussed as well as how to explore their content. As it is not a trivial task to work with EVs we will discuss critical things to consider during collection and isolation of EVs from various sample types and how to explore their function in vitro and in vivo.

During the practical, you will learn to isolate EVs using size exclusion chromatography (qEV) and a precipitation technique. The size distribution and numbers of EVs in the samples isolated by the two methods will be examined using nanoparticle tracking analysis. Western blots will be used to identify classical EV makers.

Instructors: Bradley J. Whitehead, Anders T. Boysen, Peter Nejsum

Venue: Aarhus University and AUH

Participation in the course is without cost for:

• PhD students, Research Year students and Research Honours Programme students from Aarhus University
• PhD students enrolled at partner universities of the Nordoc collaboration
• PhD students from other institutions in the open market agreement for PhD courses

Course dates:

• 22 March 2022 08:30 - 17:00
• 23 March 2022 09:00 - 17:00
• 24 March 2022 09:00 - 16:30