Transfection reagents affect Extracellular Vesicle cargo transfer to recipient cells: The importance of appropriate controls in EV research

[...]this indicated that the Cre delivery was not EV mediated, however, since chloroquine has several effects no clear conclusions could be made. [...]McConnel et al. demonstrated that neither media change nor DNAse treatment removed the TCs. To examine this the authors investigated the size of different TCs and found them to be of similar size as sEVs for all transfection reagents tested. Since TCs and EVs reside in the same endolysosomal compartments as exosomes during their biogenesis, there is moreover a risk that the TCs and exosomes are fusing. [...]the dynamic range for a single cell is either on or off.