The genetic source tracking of human urinary exosomes

The genetic origins of nanoscale extracellular vesicles in our body fluids remains unclear. Researchers at Wenzhou Medical University perform a tracking analysis of urinary exosomes via RNA sequencing, revealing that urine exosomes mostly express tissue-specific genes for the bladder and have close cell-genetic relationships to the endothelial cell, basal cell, monocyte, and dendritic cell. Tracking the differentially expressed genes of cancers and corresponding enrichment analysis show urine exosomes are intensively involved in immune activities, indicating that they may be harnessed as reliable biomarkers of noninvasive liquid biopsy in cancer genomic diagnostics and precision medicine.

The genetic source analysis of exosomes in human urine

(A) The deconvoluted tissue-proportion analysis of urinary exosome sources. (B) The differential expression of TSGs between bladder cancer and controls and (C) kidney cancer and controls. *P value < 0.05, **P value < 0.01 by unpaired two-sided Wilcoxon test. (D) Tracking the sources of urinary exosomes at the cell-type level. (E) Heatmap analysis of the traced cell types sorted by the normalized cwFold change of the DEGs of kidney cancer and bladder cancer (G). (F) The cell-type–specific pathway analysis of DEGs and the top five most enriched pathways were listed for kidney cancer and bladder cancer (H).