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posted by martyb on Friday May 01 2015, @03:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-yet-ready-for-primetime dept.

If they succeed in doing this, it would be very useful in times of crisis, especially, during natural disasters like the earthquake in Nepal.

At some point in your life, you've probably been asked to donate blood. If your blood is type O, you may have been asked to donate even more, because your blood type is the most useful and is less common. The difference between blood types may seem small--people with blood types A and B have an extra sugar molecule bound to the surface of their red blood cells--but a transfusion of the wrong blood type can be fatal. For example, the immune system of a type O individual will launch a massive attack on the "invading cells" of a type A individual, all because it detects that sugar molecule.

Now researchers from the University of British Columbia have figured out a way to change the type of blood donated by volunteers, by using an enzyme that simply snips off that extra sugar, called an antigen. The result: The blood is more like type O, the universal donor.

This isn't the first time that researchers have produced blood with fewer antigens in the lab, but this attempt has worked better than any other. The researchers used a technique called directed evolution; they used bacteria to create the enzyme and inserted particular mutations in the bacteria's DNA to make the enzyme even more powerful. After cultivating the bacteria over five generations, the enzyme became 170 times more effective.

http://www.popsci.com/scientists-figure-out-how-change-blood-types

[Abstract]: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja5116088

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Friday May 01 2015, @01:41PM

    by Kromagv0 (1825) on Friday May 01 2015, @01:41PM (#177458) Homepage

    As another person with O- blood, here in the US it is much the same. I get badgered all the time to donate, and since I have given blood through various organizations over the years I get called by all of them all the time. And yes I do give regularly as I am unfortunate enough to have hemachromatosis [wikipedia.org] that runs very strongly in my family and I do have a high but not yet problematic iron count. So in addition to being a universal donor it is good for me to get bleed out now and then. I give a pint every 2 months and have been doing so for the last 8 years and will probably continue doing so for the remainder of my life since it is better than contracting hemachromatosis and then having to get bleed anyway (but then they can't use the blood) but also having complications from the disease as well.

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