Red blood cells (RBCs) undergo extensive deformation when travelling through the microcapillaries. Deformability, the combined\nresult of properties of the membrane-cytoskeleton complex, the surface area-to-volume ratio, and the hemoglobin content, is\na critical determinant of capillary blood flow. During blood bank storage and in many pathophysiological conditions, RBC\nmorphology changes, which has been suggested to be associated with decreased deformability and removal of RBC.While various\ntechniques provide information on the rheological properties of stored RBCs, their clinical significance is controversial. We\ndeveloped a microfluidic approach for evaluating RBC deformability in a physiologically meaningful and clinically significant\nmanner. Unlike other techniques, our method enables a high-throughput determination of changes in deformation capacity to\nprovide statistically significant data, while providing morphological information at the single-cell level. Our data show that, under\nconditions that closely mimic capillary dimensions and flow, the capacity to deformand the capacity to relax are not affected during\nstorage in the blood bank. Our data also show that altered cell morphology by itself does not necessarily affect deformability.
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