There’s gold on them there vesicles!

As part of the BCHC’s focus on extra-cellular vesicles (EV) in helminthology we recently hosted a visit from Allan Cameron, a 4th year PhD student from the Devitt Laboratory, Aston University. Allan is researching the role of apoptotic cell derived extracellular vesicles (ACdEV) on the immune system. He visited Aberystwyth University to utilise the expertise of Alan Cookson in order to immuno-gold label vesicles and demonstrate that exosomes are released from dying cells. Allan’s wider work is focused on establishing the immunomodulatory role of ACdEVs released as cells progress through programmed cell death, as well as developing a vesicle by vesicle phenotyping assay based on iZON Science’s qNano platform. The work carried out at Aberystwyth has helped to answer some fundamental questions in this work and further immuno-gold labelling is planned for the future.