SOME NEW TERMINOLOGY on BLEBS, BLOBS, and ‘WHAT THE HECK IS THAT’ ! ?
I will be introducing some new terminology in the class workbook soon.
If you are old school Guenther Enderlein or Gaston Naessans, you will be familiar with the terms protit, symprotit, and somatid.
Because these words tend to be outside standard medical/hematology circles, I adopted many years ago a change in the Biomedx material to bridge to the work of Marcel Bessis who had a few college level hematology books based all on live blood viewing primarily using phase contrast microscopy. His last textbook was from the 1970 ‘s and never updated.
A good generic term for these forms that we see for lack of anything else has been essentially plasma forms, chylomicrons which we are all familiar, and phospholipid formations as they expand and bleb and blob.
As far as the small stuff, some have called them the ‘cosmic dust’ or ‘cellular dust’ as they are everywhere and in everything.
There has been a small coterie of researches pretty excited about this small stuff for a few years now, certainly as it relates to biology.
Actively growing cells continuously shed what have been called exosomes, micro vesicles, shed vesicles, matrix vesicles, outer membrane vesicles, etc. These, it appears, have now been lumped under a main identifying name of Extracellular Vesicles or EVs for short.
Definition-wise, a South Korean researcher says:
“extracellular vesicles are communicasomes, nano-sized extracellular organelles that play diverse patho-physiological roles in intercellular communication. The secretion of the EVs and EV-mediated communication are an evolutionarily conserved phenomena.”
We’re talking the nano-sized particles you see under the scope, up to a half micron in size. And they do a lot more than we know.
Who would have thought it.
I will have more on both these last topics in future blog posts.
Until then, be a communicasome yourself and communicate your wish to be at an upcoming workshop – and subscribe to our newsletter to keep updated on when they’re happeing.