Electrokinetic Evaluation of Individual Exosomes by On-Chip Microcapillary Electrophoresis with Laser Dark-Field Microscopy

Cell-secreted nanovesicles called exosomes are expected as a promising candidate biomarker of various diseases. Toward the future application of exosomes as a disease biomarker for low-invasive diagnostics, challenges remain in the development of sensitive and precise analysis methods for exosomes. In this study, we performed the electrokinetic evaluation of individual exosomes by the combined use of on-chip microcapillary electrophoresis and laser dark-field microscopy. We extracted exosomes from six types of human cell cultured in a serum-free medium by differential ultracentrifugation and their zeta potential (electrophoretic mobility) were evaluated. We demonstrated that the proposed electrophoresis apparatus is particularly suitable for the tracking analysis of the electrophoretic migration of individual exosomes and enables the accurate evaluation of the zeta potential distribution of exosomes, for the first time. From the experimental results, we found that there is a strong correlation between the average zeta potentials of exosomes and their cells of origin. (C) 2013 The Japan Society of Applied Physics