Extracellular vesicles (EVs) originate from eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells and play a crucial role in intercellular communications. They are found in the environment of cells and tissues, and contribute to the complexity of different biological media, in particular biofluids. Due to their high diversity of cell origin, size range, concentration and composition, EVs offer some of the most important challenges in (pre-)analytical fields. To tackle these challenges, many works deal with the development and implementation of a wide variety of approaches, technologies and methodologies to enrich, isolate, quantify and characterize EVs and their subsets. Nevertheless, other components such as lipoproteins or viruses in complex samples, can interfere with EVs qualification, and make difficult, even today, to standardize biochemical and physical approaches for this purpose. The present chapter presents EVs and the mostly used technics for their isolation and characterization. Performances of methods in terms of resolution, discrimination, throughput and also ability to be or not applied in clinics, are also discussed.
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