What’s in a (Red Blood) Cell?

, by Stéphane

The red blood cell is a metabolically-driven cell where protein synthesis or dna material is no more available. This specific cell is essential for life, and a tremendous amount of work has been performed to decipher the complexity of RBC during the cell differentiation process and its entire lifespan.

Red blood cells contain a very large amount of hemoglobin, essential for breathing, involved in oxygen transport and exchange. This mechanism is understood in detail but there is a lot of other proteins where their exact role and function are not described in as much details.

In order to provide a review of red blood cell content, in order to get a broader understanding of diseases and antigens linked to erythrocyte, we have set up a database of the red blood cell proteome assembling data (i) from various reference sources, (ii) incoporating protein three-dimensional structures (existing ones) or protein models (genuinely produced for the database).

You can find the details of this database in our recently published article Repository of Enriched Structures of Proteins Involved in the Red Blood Cell Environment (RESPIRE). Téletchéa S, Santuz H, Léonard S, Etchebest C. (2019). PLOS ONE 14(2) : e0211043".

The database itself is freely accessible online: RESPIRE.

Enjoy !