thumb|Transmission electron micrograph of lead citrate stained microvesicles. Black bar is 100 nanometers
thumb|Transmission electron micrograph of lead citrate stained microvesicles. Black bar is 100 nanometers
Microvesicles (ectosomes, or microparticles) are a type of extracellular vesicle (EV) that are released from the cell membrane. In multicellular organisms, microvesicles and other EVs are found both in tissues (in the interstitial space between cells) and in many types of body fluids. Delimited by a phospholipid bilayer, microvesicles can be as small as the smallest EVs (30 nm in diameter) or as large as 1000 nm. They are considered to be larger, on average, than intracellularly-generated EVs known as exosomes. Microvesicles play a role in intercellular communication and can transport molecules such as mRNA, miRNA, and proteins between cells.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).