Fabrication and Application of Functional Soft Particles Using Red Blood Cells as Template

Abstract

Using red blood cells (RBCs), we have fabricated functional soft particles, which exhibit not only several kinds of shapes but also biologically functional sugar chains of ABO blood group on the RBC membrane even after chemical fixation. It was found that chemical fixation of RBCs with paraformaldehyde significantly reduces the adsorption amount of bovine serum albumin on an RBC, but hardly affects that of lectins (i.e., proteins that recognize blood type sugar chains).

Graphical Abstract

Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) images of chemically fixed rabbit-RBC with three different shapes: biconcave discocyte, spiculated echinocyte, and sphere, from left to right.