New enzyme research could create practical way to convert blood into universal Type O blood

05/01/2015 - 00:00

What do you do when a patient needs a blood transfusion but you don’t have their blood type in the blood bank? It’s a problem that scientists have been trying to solve for years but haven’t been able to find an economic solution – until now.

University of British Columbia chemists and scientists in the Centre for Blood Research have created an enzyme that could potentially solve this problem. The enzyme works by snipping off the sugars, also known as antigens, found in Type A and Type B blood, making it more like Type O. 

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Ref:  Toward Efficient Enzymes for the Generation of Universal Blood through Structure-Guided Directed Evolution.     J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2015 | DOI: 10.1021/ja5116088