Red blood cells are the most common type of blood cell and the vertebrate body's principal means of delivering oxygen from the lungs or gills to body tissues via the blood.Red blood cells are also known as RBCs, red blood corpuscles (an archaic term), haematids or erythrocytes.
Erythrocytes consist mainly of hemoglobin, a complex molecule containing heme groups whose iron atoms temporarily link to oxygen molecules in the lungs or gills and release them throughout the body. Oxygen can easily diffuse through the red blood cell's cell membrane. Hemoglobin also carries some of the waste product carbon dioxide back from the tissues. (In humans, less than 2% of the total oxygen, and most of the carbon dioxide, is held in solution in the blood plasma). A related compound, myoglobin, acts to store oxygen in muscle cells.
The color of erythrocytes is due to the heme group of hemoglobin. The blood plasma alone is straw-colored, but the red blood cells change color depending on the state of the hemoglobin: when combined with oxygen the resulting oxyhemoglobin is scarlet, and when oxygen has been released the resulting deoxyhemoglobin is darker, appearing bluish through the vessel wall and skin. Pulse oximetry takes advantage of this color change to directly measure the arterial blood oxygen saturation using colorimetric techniques.
The sequestration of oxygen carrying proteins inside specialized cells (rather than having them dissolved in body fluid) was an important step in the evolution of vertebrates; it allows for less viscous blood, higher concentrations of oxygen, and better diffusion of oxygen from the blood to the tissues. The size of erythrocytes varies widely among vertebrate species; erythrocyte width is on average about 25% larger than capillary diameter and it has been hypothesized that this improves the oxygen transfer from erythrocytes to tissues.
The only known vertebrates that don't use erythrocytes for oxygen transport are the ice fishes (family Channichthyidae); they live in very oxygen rich cold water and transport oxygen freely dissolved in their blood.
In 2007 it was reported that erythrocytes also play a part in the body's immune response: when lysed by pathogens such as bacteria, their hemoglobin releases free radicals that break down the pathogen's cell wall and membrane, killing it.
Mammalian erythrocytes
Erythrocytes in mammals are anucleate when mature, meaning that they lack a cell nucleus and as a result, have no DNA. Red blood cells have nuclei during early phases of development, but extrude them as they mature in order to provide more space for hemoglobin. In comparison, the erythrocytes of nearly all other vertebrates have nuclei; the only known exception being salamanders of the Batrachoseps genus.Mammalian erythrocytes also lose their other organelles such as their mitochondria. As a result, red blood use none of the oxygen they transport; they produce the energy carrier ATP by fermentation, via glycolysis of glucose followed by lactic acid production. Furthermore, red cells do not have an insulin receptor and thus glucose uptake is not regulated by insulin. Because of the lack of nucleus and organelles, the red blood cells cannot synthesize any RNA, and consequently they cannot divide or repair themselves.
Mammalian erythrocytes are biconcave disks: flattened and depressed in the center, with a dumbbell-shaped cross section. This shape (as well as the loss of organelles and nucleus) optimizes the cell for the exchange of oxygen with its surroundings. The cells are flexible so as to fit through tiny capillaries, where they release their oxygen load. Erythrocytes are circular, except in the camel family Camelidae, where they are oval.
In large blood vessels, red blood cells sometimes occur as a stack, flat side next to flat side. This is known as rouleaux formation, and it occurs more often if the levels of certain serum proteins are elevated, as for instance during inflammation.
The spleen acts as a reservoir of red blood cells, but this effect is somewhat limited in humans. In some other mammals such as dogs and horses, the spleen sequesters large numbers of red blood cells which are dumped into the blood during times of exertion stress, yielding a higher oxygen transport capacity.
Human erythrocytes
The diameter of a typical human erythrocyte disk is 6–8 µm, much smaller than most other human cells. A typical erythrocyte contains about 270 million hemoglobin molecules, with each carrying four heme groups.
Adult humans have roughly 2–3 × 1013 red blood cells at any given time (women have about 4 to 5 million erythrocytes per microliter (cubic millimeter) of blood and men about 5 to 6 million; people living at high altitudes with low oxygen tension will have more). Red blood cells are thus much more common than the other blood particles: There are about 4,000–11,000 white blood cells and about 150,000–400,000 platelets in each microliter of human blood.
The red blood cells of an average adult human male store collectively about 2.5 grams of iron, representing about 65% of the total iron contained in the body.
Life cycle
The process by which red blood cells are produced is called erythropoiesis. Erythrocytes are continuously being produced in the red bone marrow of large bones, at a rate of about 2 million per second. (In the embryo, the liver is the main site of red blood cell production.) The production can be stimulated by the hormone erythropoietin (EPO), synthesised by the kidney; which is used for doping in sports. Just before and after leaving the bone marrow, they are known as reticulocytes which comprise about 1% of circulating red blood cells.
Erythrocytes develop from committed stem cells through reticulocytes to mature erythrocytes in about 7 days and live a total of about 120 days.
The aging erythrocyte undergoes changes in its plasma membrane, making it susceptible to recognition by phagocytes and subsequent phagocytosis in the spleen, liver and bone marrow. Much of the important breakdown products are recirculated in the body. The heme constituent of hemoglobin are broken down into Fe3+ and biliverdin. The biliverdin is reduced to bilirubin, which is released into the plasma and recirculated to the liver bound to albumin. The iron is released into the plasma to be recirculated by a carrier protein called transferrin. Almost all erythrocytes are removed in this manner from the circulation before they are old enough to hemolyze. Hemolyzed hemoglobin is bound to a protein in plasma called haptoglobin which is not excreted by the kidney.
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