Metabolic Depletion of Erythrocytes is Accompanied by a Decrease of Sialic Acid during Blood Bank Storage: A Reply

Abstract

Erythrocytes lose about 10% of their sialic acid during banking in ACD-AG medium. In contrast to these findings, Pessina et al. could not detect a significant banking related sialic acid decrease. The present paper explains this discrepancy. The vesiculation of erythrocytes is mainly responsible for the observed sialic acid loss during blood preservation.

Erythrocyte Membrane Vesiculation and Changes in Membrane Composition during Storage in Citrate-Phosphate-Dextrose-Adenine-1

“…The size, configuration and biochemical composition of the vesicles found in our samples are similar to those described by others whether formed by red cells depleted rapidly of ATP [8,32], more slowly during refrigerated storage [6,7] or in the presence of4MNaCl [38], The relatively low values for lipid losses found by us and the wide ranges of values reported in the literature can be explained by the higher values of ATP maintained in the presence of adenine and the use of plastic versus the glass con tainers by others [4,[6][7][8][9]27,28,39,40]. The recent finding by Estep [personal commun.…”

ABO Blood Group as a Model for Platelet Glycan Modification in Arterial Thrombosis

“…This hypothesis was investigated by McGrath et al, where desialyated VWF was more prone to cleavage by serine and cysteine proteases, but less susceptible to cleavage by ADAMTS13 (23), supporting the idea that similarly to ABO glycosylation, sialyation of VWF may alter its rate of clearance. In fact, the effect of siaylation may even be understated, as erythrocytes and platelets lose their sialic acid during blood banking via irreversible membrane alterations (24). Although it is unknown if VWF loses sialic acid during sample banking, any tendency for ex vivo desiaylation could make it more difficult to identify the specific targets of siaylation that ultimately impact VWF level.…”