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Scientists Crack a 50-Year Mystery to Discover a New Set of Blood Groups
We now know why some blood is missing a key antigen—leading to the creation of a new blood-grouping system. Experts believe even more discoveries are on the way.
Nicole Thornton, a coauthor of the study who also works at NHS Blood and Transplant, can’t give a specific estimate, but suggests there could be fewer than tens of thousands of such people on the planet: “There’s probably more than we realize, but it’s still super, super rare.” Just eight AnWj-negative blood samples caused by a person’s genetics are listed in the paper, and some of those came from members of the same families. First, following painstaking efforts to find antibodies that would react with it, they established that the crucial AnWj antigen (encoded by the MAL gene) was indeed present on the surface of most people’s red blood cells. Scientists—mindful of the patients whose lives are affected by this, who will struggle to find matching blood donors, or who, in some cases, may suffer devastating complications during pregnancy —regularly pore over those samples, hoping to explain them one day.
Or read this on Wired
