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Figure 2. The characteristics of sEVs and the sEVs mRNA signature of plasma in NTG patients. (A) Characteristics of plasma sEVs: Transmission electron microscopy images of sEVs with scale bar = 500 nm; nanoparticle tracking analysis for a particle diameter, and immunoblotting for commonly used sEVs protein markers, which include Alix, TSG101, and syntenin; (B) Volcano plot of mRNAs in plasma sEVs. The red dots represent upregulated genes; the blue dots represent downregulated genes; (C) GO and KEGG analyses of mRNAs that were differentially expressed with a fold change ≥ 2 and P ≤ 0.05 between the NTG and cataract groups. The X-axis represents the -log10 (P value), and the Y-axis represents the top 15 functions or signaling pathways associated with each term; (D) Venn diagram of neurodegenerative disease-related pathways. Genes involved in multiple neurogenerative pathways are shown in red; (E) The expression levels of mitochondrial mRNAs in pooled plasma sEVs. The data are represented as the means ± SEM. ^****P < 0.0001. sEVs: Small extracellular vesicles; NTG: normal tension glaucoma; GO: Gene Ontology; KEGG: Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes.