Malvern Specialist to Explore use of Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis for Characterising Extracellular Vesicles at ISEV 2014

Pauline Carnell, Senior Application Scientist at Malvern Instruments, will present a paper at ISEV 2014 discussing ‘The practical use of nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) to characterise extracellular vesicles in general and when using fluorescence markers’.

ISEV 2014 is a meeting of the International Society for Extracellular Vesicles. It takes place in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, from 30 April to 3 May 2014, with an education day on 29 April. Pauline Carnell will present the paper, co-authored with colleagues Andrew Malloy, Agnieszka Siupa, Patrick Hole and Bob Carr, on 30 April. All the authors are experts in the technology and application of NanoSight Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA).

NanoSight NTA systems are now offered as part of Malvern’s portfolio of analytical solutions for characterisation at the nanoscale.

Extracellular vesicles, typically 30–100 nm, are released within and from a wide variety of cells. They are increasingly implicated and appear in a multitude of pathological conditions and show much promise as diagnostics for many different diseases including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's and pre-eclampsia. However, developments in this area are constrained by limitations in the technology available for their measurement.

NanoSight Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis offers the potential to rapidly enumerate and speciate these particles. In this method the particles in suspension scatter laser light, which is collected by a CCD (or sCMOS) camera via a microscope-type configuration. Particles are tracked individually and their diffusion coefficient, and therefore size, calculated directly from their speed. This gives a direct measurement of the concentration and size distribution of the particles in the field of view.

Fluorescent labelling of particles for expressed markers enables measurement of the concentration and size distribution of those labelled particles only, allowing the proportion of labelled particles to be calculated. Pauline Carnell’s presentation will examine some of the challenges and considerations required during protocol development and measurement, and will include examples of good methodologies and appropriate controls.