Red cells are able to elastically deform. The extraordinary importance of this property can be appreciated from recalling that, although the human red cell is a biconcave disk eight microns in diameter, it can easily pass through capillaries half this size. This remarkable feat is accomplished by the red cell transiently changing its shape during passage after which its well-known biconcave form spontaneously and nearly instantly recovers. We are studying the structural basis of this property using cryo electron microscopy.

The above image is a cryo electron micrograph of unstained frozen-hydrated membrane skeletons. Spectrin tetramers (indicated by arrow heads) cross-link actin junctional complexes (indicated by arrows) to form an extensive 2-dimensional network.

Li, L. and Josephs, R. (1993) Cryo-Electron Microscopy of Human Erythrocyte Membrane Skeletons. Proceedings of the 51st annual meeting of the Microscopy Society of America San Francisco Press, San Francisco. p. 116.

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