3.25 in. x 4 in. Lantern Slides, Dr. V. T. Marchesi from Yale and colleagues took advantage of the high purity of red cell ghosts obtained by hypotonic lysis to analyze the properties of membrane proteins. They identified spectrin (from the Latin specere, to look at - or ghost) as a major red cell membrane cytoskeletal protein responsible for maintaining the biconcave shape of red cells. In hereditary spherocytosis, spectrin is mutated resulting in anemias due to greater fragility of red cells which cannot assume a biconcave shape., and Original Magnification: x25,000
