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Large Extracellular Vesicles in Cell Culture and Blood: Role in Prion Transmission and Detection by Flow Cytometry
Soukup, Jakub ; Holada, Karel (advisor) ; Šebestová Janoušková, Olga (referee) ; Živný, Jan (referee)
Prions (PrP) are the main cause of neurodegenerative diseases such as Scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, chronic wasting disease in deer, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. Although the cellular PrP (PrPC ) is involved in many cellular processes, its precise function still needs to be discovered. The disease is caused by the accumulation of a pathological form of PrP (PrPTSE ), which is caused by direct contact of PrPTSE and PrPC . PrP is anchored in the membrane by GPI and can be transmitted by cell-to-cell contact, tunnelling nanotubes, or extracellular vesicles (EVs). EV factions are divided by different biogenesis into exosomes, microvesicles, and apoptotic bodies. PrPTSE was found in exosomes and microvesicles, but these fractions were never compared to each other. The first aim of the doctoral thesis is a comparison of PrP content, prion-converting activity and infectivity in these fractions on CAD5 and N2a-PK1 cellular models of infection. We isolated a fraction of large EVs (20,000× g) and small EVs (110,000× g) by centrifugation from a conditioned medium. We characterised EVs by cryo-electron microscopy and western blot with Alix, TSG-101, CD63, CD9, and HSP70 markers. The contamination from other cellular compartments was checked by calnexin. EV fractions differed...
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