How can we understand "sEV-containing droplets"?

[onmyojiyys]

Thank you for the excellent work of your team.
How can we understand "sEV-containing droplets"? After tissue dissociation, sEVs and cells should be in a separated state. How can it be determined which cell the sEV originates from?

[RuiqiaoHe]

The term 'sEV-containing droplet' refers to a droplet that contains sEV in scRNA-seq. To be computationally recognized, SEVtras only identifies droplets with a strong sEV signature signal as 'sEV-containing droplet' during EM iterations.
It is yet to be explored in further experiments whether one droplet in scRNA-seq can capture sEVs secreted by spatially proximate cells or cells of the same type, or even the encapsulated state of sEVs during microfluidics. One hypothesis is that: When multivesicular bodies (MVBs) fuse with the plasma membrane, multiple sEVs in the MVB are released simultaneously. These sEVs from similar cells tend to aggregate into micro-sized clusters and localize to specific areas. The micro-sized cluster may then be captured by a specific droplet, potentially containing a strong signal of sEVs that is more easily detected by SEVtras. To deconvolve sEVs back to secreted cells, we compared the expression similarity between identified sEVs and cells, which was only used as a proxy for calculating the ESAI (secretion activity) of certain cell types in our article.