Mass-Scale Red Blood Cell Genotyping May Assist in Finding Antigen Negative Blood

Finding antigen negative blood is difficult and time consuming, especially when using serologic methods. The Blood Center of Wisconsin recently implemented mass-scale red blood cell genotyping on non-Caucasian donors and repeat donors who had a recent blood donation.

Over four years, 43,000 donors were screened for 32 single nucleotide polymorphisms that predicted 42 blood group antigens.  There was a discordance rate of 0.52% between real-time PCR mass-scale genotyping and serologic phenotypes.  Since mass-scale genotyping is accurate, has a rapid turn-around time and can handle more than 700 samples per day, this large blood center was able to abandon serologic screening.

Reference

1. Flegel WA, Gottschall JL, Denomme GA.  Implementing mass-scale red cell genotyping at a blood center.  Transfusion 2015; Epub ahead of print. doi: 10.1111/trf.13168.

Transfusion offers CME credit for this study! Log on at www.wileyhealthlearning.com/trf.