Flow-Alignment of Extracellular Vesicles: Structure and Orientation of Membrane Associated Biomacromolecules Studied with Polarized Light

Szigyártó, Imola Cs. and Deák, Róbert and Mihály, Judith and Rocha, Sandra and Zsila, Ferenc and Varga, Zoltán and Beke-Somfai, Tamás (2018) Flow-Alignment of Extracellular Vesicles: Structure and Orientation of Membrane Associated Biomacromolecules Studied with Polarized Light. CHEMBIOCHEM, 19 (6). pp. 545-551. ISSN 1439-4227

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Abstract

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are currently in the scientific focus having a great potential to revolutionize the diagnosis and therapy of various diseases. However, numerous aspects of these species are still poorly understood, thus additional insight to molecular level properties, membrane-protein interactions, or membrane rigidity is still needed. We here demonstrate using red blood cell derived EVs (REVs) that polarized light spectroscopy techniques, linear and circular dichroism, can provide molecular level structural information on these systems. Flow-linear dichroism (flow-LD) measurements show that EVs can be oriented by shear force, and indicate that hemoglobin molecules are associated to the lipid bilayer in freshly released REVs. During storage this interaction ceases coupled to major protein conformational changes relative to the initial state. Further on, the degree of orientation gives insight to vesicle rigidity, which decreases in time parallel to changes in protein conformation. In overall, we propose that both LD and circular dichroism (CD) spectra provide simple, rapid, yet efficient ways to track changes in membrane-protein interactions of EV components at the molecular level which may also give insight to processes occurring during vesiculation.

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