{"doi":"10.1002/jev2.12061","title":"Foetal bovine serum influence on in vitro extracellular vesicle analyses","abstract":"Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are nanosized lipid bilayer vesicles most notably from either endosomal (i.e., exosomes) or plasma membrane origins (i.e., microvesicles/ectosomes) and released from nearly all mammalian cells (Colombo et al., 2014). An interest in EV research has increased over the past decade, in part due to their participation in complex intercellular communication (Roy et al., 2018). Though EVs are abundant in blood and other biofluids, the investigation of in vitro-derived EVs provides a critical tool for understanding various mechanisms associated with their biogenesis, molecular composition, packaging of specific payloads, and cellular trafficking. Once released, EVs traffic to target cells where they may be taken up to release their payloads via specific mechanisms, and thereby exert their physiological influence (Colombo et al., 2014; Kowal et al., 2014). Although engineered micelles and liposomes have previously been utilized as lipid nanocarriers (Fiandaca & S., 2013; Fiandaca et al., 2011) for many therapeutic applications, EVs have garnered recent interest as drug delivery vehicles (Elsharkasy et al., 2020). Currently, there exist vastly heterogeneous cell culture conditions for EV production and isolation (Consortium, 2017). Therefore, there is a current need to define more standard cell culture conditions for investigating EVs that may accelerate the translation of therapeutic clinical-grade EVs (Lener et al., 2015; Lötvall et al., 2014; Théry et al., 2018). Herein, we present a mini-review on recent investigations reporting the influence of foetal bovine serum (FBS)-supplemented media formulations on cultured cell physiology, EV production/release, and its contaminating presence of vesicular and non-vesicular particles. Additionally, we describe potential solutions and provide recommendations to aid in vitro EV investigators. An international survey observed 83% of International Society for Extracellular Vesicles (ISEV) respondents utilize conditioned cell culture media as their starting material (Gardiner et al., 2016). FBS is a common additive in cell culture and 52% of ISEV respondents utilize serum-containing media for downstream EV analyses, with 59% and 57% of those respondents performing in vitro and in vivo functional studies, respectively (Gardiner et al., 2016). Serum usage, in part due to its ill-defined composition, provides a variety of contaminating particles (e.g., EVs, lipoproteins, and protein complexes, which differ in their physical properties, yet also have similar size, density, and/or RNA components) that confound these investigative results. The growth factors and other constituents within FBS appear to provide a nourishing ecosystem for many cultured cells (Bettger & Mckeehan, 1986). Despite this nourishing milieu, the presence of FBS in culture has raised specific concerns, including the potential introduction of toxins, viral or prion proteins, and mycoplasma, as well as increased culture variability associated with the inconsistency in the FBS manufacturing process (Khodabukus & Baar, 2014; Kirikae et al., 1997; Treadwell, 1963). Moreover, FBS continues to theoretically raise the potential for both xeno-immunization and inadvertent zoonotic agent transmission when considered in clinical applications (Dessels et al., 2016). The major consequence of using native FBS (i.e., untreated FBS that has not undergone any depletion process) to supplement culture media for EV investigations is the requisite introduction of exogenous FBS-derived EVs and other nanoparticles (e.g., protein/growth factor aggregates) within the population of in vitro-derived EVs, thereby contaminating the EV fraction available for downstream isolation (Figure 1). Upon EV isolation, the final fraction will contain a mixture of EVs (and potentially other nanoparticles) derived from both the cultured cells and the conditioned media, thereby confounding any in vitro and in vivo analyses. Moreover, cell-free DN","journal":"Journal of Extracellular Vesicles","year":2021,"id":147886,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":142,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.954,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":628876,"name":"Yaxuan Liang","orcid":"0000-0003-2729-5171","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":80304,"name":"Massimo S. Fiandaca","orcid":"0000-0002-8376-1934","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":414010,"name":"Brandon M. Lehrich","orcid":"0000-0003-1003-5605","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":88,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:42:35.448762Z","pmid":"33532042","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}