Transforming undergraduate laboratory courses with interlinked real-world challenges.

Undergraduate laboratory course components often provide training in various techniques without connections to an interlinked real-world scenario. This article emphasizes the benefits of longitudinal integration of research techniques to enhance learning and emphasize societal relevance. An example of a biomedical engineering challenge involving a new pandemic is described.

Extracellular Vesicle and Lipoprotein Interactions.

Extracellular vesicles and lipoproteins are lipid-based biological nanoparticles that play important roles in (patho)physiology. Recent evidence suggests that extracellular vesicles and lipoproteins can interact to form functional complexes. Such complexes have been observed in biofluids from healthy human donors and in various in vitro disease models such as breast cancer and hepatitis C infection. Lipoprotein components can also form part of the biomolecular corona that surrounds extracellular vesicles and contributes to biological identity. Potential mechanisms and the functional relevance of extracellular vesicle-lipoprotein complexes remain poorly understood. This Review addresses the current knowledge of the extracellular vesicle-lipoprotein interface while drawing on pre-existing knowledge of liposome interactions with biological nanoparticles. There is an urgent need for further research on the lipoprotein-extracellular vesicle interface, which could return important mechanistic, therapeutic, and diagnostic findings.

Hyaluronic acid: An overlooked extracellular vesicle contaminant.

The variable presence of contaminants in extracellular vesicle (EV) samples is one of the major contributors to a lack of inter-study reproducibility in the field. Well-known contaminants include protein aggregates, RNA-protein complexes and lipoproteins, which resemble EVs in shape, size and/or density. On the contrary, polysaccharides, such as hyaluronic acid (HA), have been overlooked as EV contaminants. Here, it is shown that low and medium molecular weight HA polymers are unexpectedly retained to some extent in EV fractions using two common isolation methods known for high purity: size-exclusion chromatography and tangential flow filtration. Although these isolation techniques are capable of efficient removal of non-EV-associated proteins, this is not the case for HA polymers, which are partially retained in a molecular weight-dependent manner, especially with size-exclusion chromatography. The supramolecular structure and hydrodynamic size of HA are likely to contribute to isolation in EV fractions of filtration-based approaches. Conversely, HA polymers were not retained with ultracentrifugation and polymer-based precipitation methods, which are known for co-isolating other types of contaminants. HA has a broad range of immunomodulatory effects, similar to those ascribed to various sources of EVs. Therefore, HA contaminants should be considered in future studies to avoid potential inaccurate attributions of functional effects to EVs.