With or without you: a tale about oxygen removal from stored, packed erythrocytes.

Abstract

In the present issue of Blood Transfusion, Longo and colleagues from Zolla’s group1 in Italy describe the outcome of a pilot proteomics study, whereby the authors confirmed that prolonged anaerobic storage of leucoreduced packed red blood cells, for the whole storage period under standard storage conditions at 4 °C, was characterized by less haemolysis during storage, improved erythrocyte membrane proteome homeostasis by decreasing the likelihood of protein fragmentation and aggregation, as well as red blood cell microvesiculation in comparison with the controls blood units which had been stored under standard aerobic storage conditions. They also showed that only during the last days of storage did deoxygenated packed erythrocytes had better resistance to osmotic stress than had control packed erythrocytes. Two-dimensional gel electrophoretic approaches confirmed that deoxygenation of packed erythrocytes prevented membrane accumulation of peroxiredoxin-2, a key anti-oxidant protein and a supposed biomarker of red blood cell aging in vitro. Proteomics, an important research tool in transfusion blood products, can provide information on the production and storage processes of packed red blood cell products and finally aid quality assurance in transfusion medicine2. Zolla’s team, which is well established in the field of proteomics and especially in transfusion medicine, for the first time provides a proteomics analysis of deoxygenated packed red cells.