Exosomes (small extracellular vesicles) in living organisms play an important role in processes such as cell proliferation or intercellular communication. Recently, exosomes have been extensively investigated for biomarker discoveries for various diseases. An important aspect of exosome analysis involves the development of enrichment methods that have been introduced for successful isolation of exosomes. These methods include ultracentrifugation, size exclusion chromatography, polyethylene glycol‐based precipitation, immunoaffinity‐based enrichment, ultrafiltration, and asymmetric flow field‐flow fractionation among others. To confirm the presence of exosomes, various characterization methods have been utilized such as Western blot analysis, atomic force microscopy, electron microscopy, optical methods, zeta potential, visual inspection, and mass spectrometry. Recent advances in high‐resolution separations, high‐performance mass spectrometry and comprehensive proteome databases have all contributed to the successful analysis of exosomes from patient samples. Herein we review various exosome enrichment methods, characterization methods, and recent trends of exosome investigations using mass spectrometry‐based approaches for biomarker discovery.

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Conventional dried droplet (DD) methods show poor reproducibility in matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS) due to the frequent induction of a heterogeneous sample distribution. Recently, a forced dried droplet...

N-glycans are biologically important oligosaccharides associated with the asparagine residue that may exist in protein-bound or unbound forms in all eukaryotes (including yeasts) and some bacteria. The-core structure of these oligosaccharides is based on the trimannosyl chitobiose structure resulting from cellular N-glycosylation. Preparative-scale amounts of these oligosaccharides are important for chemical, structural and functional studies due to their biological significance. Therefore, we explored a biochemical approach of oligosaccharide preparation using mutant-derived monoglucosylated lipid-linked oligosaccharides (LLOs) required for the assembly of N-linked glycoproteins and non-monoglucosylated free-oligosaccharides (fOSs) from misfolded N-linked glycoproteins using an N-glycosylation (alg) mutant of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Oligosaccharide extracts of fOSs and LLOs from the alg8 S. cerevisiae mutant lacking the ALG8 gene were profiled using fluorescence-and evaporative light scattering-based HPLC. LLOs did not produce accumulated levels of the target mutant-related monoglucosylated (Glc 1 Man 9 GlcNAc 2) at 100 ml scale. However, it was possible to detect truncated oligomannose (paucimannose) structures in the fOSs of the alg8 mutant.