In 2019 Dr. Stephen Withers and colleagues at the University of British Columbia identified a series of enzymes that can be used to modify the chemical structure of a sugar antigen on the surface of blood cells, thereby converting a Type A blood cell to a Type O blood cell—the universal donor type. The team used crystallography on the CMCF beamline at the CLS to better understand how the enzymes cause this change, and published their results in Nature Microbiology.
Blood-type conversion process informed by crystallography now in pre-clinical trials
In 2019 Dr. Stephen Withers and colleagues at the University of British Columbia identified a series of enzymes that can be used to modify the chemical structure of a sugar antigen on the surface of blood cells, thereby converting a Type A blood cell to a Type O blood cell—the universal donor type. The team used crystallography on the CMCF beamline at the CLS to better understand how the enzymes cause this change, and published their results in Nature Microbiology.