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Cona To Citrate Experiment

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Citrate is known to prevent the agglutination of red blood cells while ConA on the other hand based on our experiment from Lab 7 we saw it was functional and was able to bind to our red blood cells. If ConA is able to agglutinate the cells that means it is biologically active. In our experiment we plated another variable by adding red blood cells and ConA and sugars to see whether the sugars interfered with ConA’s ability to bind we noticed that galactose did not interfere with the agglutination but mannose did interfere with the binding, acting as a competitive inhibitor. We know this was due to ConA’s specificity for mannose and glucose. In our experiment we had 9mLs of dilute ConA and we decreased the volume while increasing our concentration …show more content…

This is due to the fact that ConA binds to the sugars, raises the molecular weight, and causes them to clump and bind to each other. The addition of glucose to coagulant solution further enhances the clumping activity of the ConA which suggests that the addition of ConA and glucose to RBC having dilute citrate solution will cause the red blood cells to clump immediately. In general, if we add equal concentrations of ConA and glucose it seems likely that agglutination would occur even with the citrate presence. If we added equal amounts of ConA and galactose to a dilute suspension of citrated red blood cells in ConA buffer again it can be seen from our data that the addition of ConA and galactose to RBC causes clumping. RBCs + ConA + galactose —-> agglutination. This is due to the fact that the addition of glucose further to the surface sugars of RBCs which thus causes them to clump. It should also be noted that the anti-coagulant is present in low concentrations which should mean that its activity should be slow. Overall, this reaction shows immediate clumping which can be visualized even further by what we can actually see with our eyes with the thick red clump

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