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Lab-made universal blood could revolutionize transfusions. Scientists just got one step closer to making it.
Enzymes produced by gut bacteria can remove long sugar chains in type A and B blood, leading to improved compatibility with type O.
So, we simply borrowed the enzymes from the bacteria that normally metabolize mucus and then applied them to the red [blood] cells," Dr. Martin Olsson, a professor of hematology and transfusion medicine at Lund University in Sweden, told Live Science. When they did, they found that type A and B stripped of these well-known antigens still harbored long chains of sugar molecules, called extensions, which also seemed to lead to incompatibility. The group used a cocktail of enzymes from Akkermansia muciniphila — a type of bacteria in the human gut that breaks down these long sugar chains in the mucus lining the intestine.
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