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Editorial
. 2019 Aug 1;8(1):1648167.
doi: 10.1080/20013078.2019.1648167. eCollection 2019.

Extracellular vesicles or exosomes? On primacy, precision, and popularity influencing a choice of nomenclature

Kenneth W Witwer  1 , Clotilde Théry  2
Affiliations
Editorial

Extracellular vesicles or exosomes? On primacy, precision, and popularity influencing a choice of nomenclature

Kenneth W Witwer et al. J Extracell Vesicles. .
No abstract available

Keywords: MISEV; MISEV2018; Nomenclature; ectosome; exosome; extracellular vesicle; microparticle; microvesicle; outer membrane vesicle; terminology.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Usage and rate of increase of common EV terms in PubMed-indexed articles. Top left: number of published articles from 1990 to 2018 including each term as a text word (singular or plural), “Ectosome” here also encompasses terms such as microvesicle and microparticle. Searches were designed with Boolean operators in an attempt to eliminate articles unrelated to EVs, such as those including alternative definitions as alluded to in the text (e.g. the intracellular “exosome” complex, the sponge “ectosome”, synthetic microparticles, and intracellular microvesicles). Nevertheless, entries from 1990 to 2007 were curated manually to remove non-EV articles. By 2008, non-EV usages fell to <10% of the total, and manual curation was not done for subsequent years. Since some articles use more than one term, the total (“All”) may be less than the sum of the individual terms. Note that false negatives and positives from the searches are possible, so all numbers should be taken as approximate. Bottom left: year-to-year change in usage of each term, starting with 2008 and expressed as per cent change (0 = no change). Top right: number of articles with titles containing “exosome” (or “exosomal”) or “extracellular vesicle”. Bottom right: year-to-year change in article title usage.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. Fox AS, Yoon SB, Gelbart WM. DNA-induced transformation in Drosophila: genetic analysis of transformed stocks. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1971;68(2):342–346. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/5277082 - PMC - PubMed

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