Blood. Gruesome symbol of death, priceless donation, sacred, evil, life-giving. No matter where you go in this world people believe in the power of blood.

From the malaria researchers in rural Africa who struggle to take a simple finger-prick blood sample from people who believe that the taking of blood is witchcraft to the Halloween revellers who cover themselves in fake blood for fun.

How much do we really know about blood, what it is, how it is made and the origins of human blood? Far from frightening I think the story of blood is fascinating.

Have you ever wondered what your blood group actually means? How is blood group AB different to blood group O?

This is all down to proteins on the surface of your red blood cells called antigens. Human red blood cells have one of four combinations of two types of antigen – A antigens and B antigens. People with blood group A have red blood cells that only have A antigens, Blood group B only have B antigens, Blood group AB have a combination of both and Blood group O have neither.

Austrian scientist Karl Landsteiner first described the blood grouping pattern of humans in the early 1900s. Since then we have managed to find out very little about the purpose of these antigens.

Blood group O is clearly the most common and people with blood group O seem to manage just fine without any A or B antigens. Interestingly we have found that people belonging to the A and B blood groups may be more susceptible to certain diseases.

For example people with group B seem to get more serious E.coli infections and those with group A were more likely to be affected by smallpox.

We have also discovered that the ABO blood grouping is not even close to the whole picture. There are as many as 20 different blood groups made up of a large variety of combinations of antigens.

Rhesus factor (the positive or negative addition to your ABO blood group) indicates whether you have the rhesus antigen on your red blood cells. But there are also the Diego, Kidd, Kell and Duffy blood groups.

Your personal blood type will be a bit like a barcode showing whether or not your red blood cells have or don’t don’t each of the blood group antigens.

Understanding blood group antigens is critical to our ability to treat disease and trauma that leads to blood loss.

The first transplant took place in 1907 just months after Prof Landsteiner’s research was published.

Now, we can harvest blood from healthy donors (hail all you blood donating heroes out there), store it and transfuse it to someone else to save their life. The big issue with blood donation is that there is never quite enough – particularly of the rarer combinations of blood group antigens.

This is one area of medicines where stem cell technology may make a huge difference.

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