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Refinement of Fate Specification in Induced Erythroid Progenitors

Johansson, Alban (2018) MOBN03 20172
Degree Projects in Molecular Biology
Popular Abstract
Production of Red Blood Cells from Skin Cells

Red Blood Cells (RBCs) are most important when it comes to delivering oxygen to different tissues and organs. This is why their production has to be continuously maintained. It is estimated that in humans over two million RBCs are produced every second to replenish the pool. On average their life span is around 120 days before they die and get replaced.

During my project, I have attempted to convert skin cells from mice to RBCs. To be more exact, the cells that I aimed to generate are a type of precursor cell to the RBC, that means it has not fully developed into an RBC. The reason for trying to produce these precursor cells is that we would like to isolate them and afterwards force the... (More)
Production of Red Blood Cells from Skin Cells

Red Blood Cells (RBCs) are most important when it comes to delivering oxygen to different tissues and organs. This is why their production has to be continuously maintained. It is estimated that in humans over two million RBCs are produced every second to replenish the pool. On average their life span is around 120 days before they die and get replaced.

During my project, I have attempted to convert skin cells from mice to RBCs. To be more exact, the cells that I aimed to generate are a type of precursor cell to the RBC, that means it has not fully developed into an RBC. The reason for trying to produce these precursor cells is that we would like to isolate them and afterwards force the generation of high numbers of RBCs from the precursor cells. By carefully analyzing the final RBCs and improving this process, there is a huge potential to apply this knowledge in a clinical setting. Patients that have diseases associated with their production of blood cells, such as anemia (shortage of RBCs) experience symptoms such as shortness of breath, fatigue, dizziness, would benefit greatly from transfusions. Under today’s circumstances patients receive blood transfusions that are matched with their blood type. Therefore, patients with rare blood types might not always have a transfusion readily available. By refining this method, it would be conceivable to have healthy donors with rare blood types give small biological skin samples which could be used to generate a blood transfusion backup that is ready, should someone need an urgent transfusion. It would also possible to generate RBCs from the patient’s own skin cells (autologous transplantation).


Master’s Degree Project in Molecular Biology [60 credits]
Department of Biology, Lund University

Supervisors: Assistant Prof. Johan Flygare MD, Ph.D., Melissa Ilsley Ph.D.

Department of Molecular Medicine and Gene Therapy

Student Counselor: Christina Ledje
Department of Biology, Lund University (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
author
Johansson, Alban
supervisor
organization
course
MOBN03 20172
year
type
H2 - Master's Degree (Two Years)
subject
language
English
id
8958916
date added to LUP
2018-09-17 15:04:52
date last changed
2018-09-17 15:04:52
@misc{8958916,
  author       = {{Johansson, Alban}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Refinement of Fate Specification in Induced Erythroid Progenitors}},
  year         = {{2018}},
}