practical 7 in a test-tube
I n practical 7 you will be working with red blood cells and proteins called lectins that bind sugars. A little background... Since red blood cells have sugars on their cell surface, and since lectin proteins have more than one sugar binding site, if you add lectin proteins to a suspension of red blood cells, the lectin proteins will bind the sugars on the red blood cells and consequentially link the red blood cells up in a 3D array. In this lab you will be looking at the ability of lectins to bind and cross-link red blood cells, and at the ability of sugars in solution to compete and interfere with this binding. I'll add a pictorial description of this in a later post...for now back to the lab overview. During this lab you will be: using a microscope to count red blood cells and estimate total cell number in your sample performing a protein binding assay designing and performing an experiment to determine the net surface charge of red blood ce...