Strategies to Isolate Extracellular Vesicles from Gram-Negative and Gram-Positive Bacteria

Abstract

Membrane vesicles are produced by all Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria investigated so far. Membrane vesicles are spherical bilayers of phospholipids released by the bacteria to their surrounding environment and whose average size is comprised between 20 and 300 nm. The purification of these vesicles is often a challenge, as the yield and purity are often crucial for further analyses or use. In this chapter, we describe the most used method to isolate membrane vesicles from culture supernatant of Streptococcus pneumoniae and Klebsiella pneumoniae using ultracentrifugation followed by a density gradient method.

Keywords: Bacteria; Density gradient; Gram-negative; Gram-positive; Membrane vesicles; Ultracentrifugation.