• Exosomes' concentration and dimensions are altered by the sudden FBS starvation as environmental stress
  • Ali Fallah,1 Azadeh Mohammad-Hasani,2 Abasalt Hosseinzadeh Colagar,3,* Ayyoob Khosravi,4 Mohsen Saeidi,5
    1. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Faculty of Basic Science, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran.
    2. Department of Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Advanced Medical Technologies, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, Iran
    3. Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, Faculty of Basic Science, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran.
    4. Department of Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Advanced Medical Technologies, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, Iran
    5. Department of Immunology, School of Medicine, Golestan University of Medical Sciences, Gorgan, Iran


  • Introduction: The physiological condition, chemical properties, and serum used as a source of growth factors, hormones, and attachment factors can impact the quality, size, and quantity of exosomes derived from cell culture. Exosomes as important components of the intercellular microenvironment have been found to play a role in regulating cell-to-cell communication. Removing fetal bovine serum (FBS) from the culture medium may induce cellular stress and potentially affect exosome biogenesis. To examine how the secretion of exosomes and their properties in stem cells from human-exfoliated deciduous teeth (SHED) are influenced by sudden and gradual serum-free media (SFM).
  • Methods: The exosomes will be isolated from the culture medium of SHED-MSCs after removing FBS using an Exocib exosome isolation kit (Cibbiotech, Tehran, Iran) following the manufacturer’s protocol. We analyzed exosomes from two groups of SHED-MSC with NanoDrop, Bradford, DLS, and AFM.
  • Results: Both groups exhibited differences in terms of average yield, nanoparticle sizes as determined by DLS, and SHED-MSC-Exos dimensions as observed through AFM analysis.
  • Conclusion: When cells are deprived of serum, which is known as serum starvation, it acts as a form of environmental stress that decreases their overall cellular activity. The sudden removal of FBS creates tension within the cells and impacts the production and release of exosomes within the cells.
  • Keywords: Serum-free media (SFM), Exosome, SHED-MSC, sudden SFM, gradient SFM