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“This is important, because if you only have a couple of hundred blood group molecules per cell instead of a thousand or even a million molecules, then there is a risk that they may be missed in a blood compatibility test, which can affect the safety of a blood transfusion,” explains Martin L Olsson, professor in Transfusion Medicine at Lund University, and consultant within Clinical Immunology and Transfusion Medicine, Region Skåne, who has led the project.
The Helgeson blood group has been a mystery that has eluded the research world for a long time. Approximately 1% of the population has this blood group but it hasn’t even been possible to detect it with the help of DNA techniques. In addition, the mechanism behind the low CR1 expression has remained unexplained.
“Now the gene simply idles. In our study, we also showed this genetic variant to be more common in Thai blood donors compared with Swedish blood donors, which makes sense since we know from previous studies that a lower CR1 level is protective against malaria,” explains Martin L. Olsson.