Real-Time analysis of exosome secretion of single cells with single molecule imaging.

The exosome-mediated response can promote or restrain the diseases by regulating the intracellular pathways, making the exosome become an effective marker for diagnosis and therapeutic control at the single-cell level. However, real-time analysis is hard to be achieved with traditional approaches because the exosomes usually need to be enriched by ultracentrifugation for a measurable signal-to-noise ratio. Recently developed label-free single-molecule imaging approaches may become an real-time quantitative tool for the analysis of single exosomes and related secretion behaviors of single living cells owing to their extreme sensitivity.