Farmasevtika instituti farmakologiya va klinik farmatsiya kafedrasi

Shape and Size of Red Blood Cells.
 
Normal red blood cells, shown in Figure 32-3, are biconcave discs having a mean diameter of 
about 7.8 micrometers and a thickness of 2.5 micrometers at the thickest point and 1 micrometer or 
less in the center. The average volume of the red blood cell is 90 to 95 cubic micrometers. The shapes 
of red blood cells can change remarkably as the cells squeeze through capillaries. Actually, the red 
blood cell is a ―bag‖ that can be deformed into almost any shape. Furthermore, because the normal cell 
has a great excess of cell membrane for the quantity of material inside, deformation does not stretch 
the membrane greatly and, consequently, does not rupture the cell, as would be the case with many 
other cells. 
Quantity of Hemoglobin in the Cells. 
Red blood cells have the ability to concentrate 
hemoglobin in the cell fluid up to about 34 grams in each 100 milliliters of cells. The concentration 
does not rise above this value because this is the metabolic limit of the cell‘s hemoglobin-forming 
mechanism. Furthermore, in normal people, the percentage of hemoglobin is almost always near the 
maximum in each cell. However, when hemoglobin formation is deficient, the percentage of 
hemoglobin in the cells may fall considerably below this value and the volume of the red cell may also 
decrease because of diminished hemoglobin to fill the cell. When the hematocrit (the percentage of 
blood that is in cells—normally, 40 to 45 percent) and the quantity of hemoglobin in each respective 
cell are normal, the whole blood of.
Pluripotential Hematopoietic Stem Cells, Growth Inducers, and Differentiation 
Inducers. 
The blood cells begin their lives in the bone marrow from a single type of cell called the 
pluripotential hematopoietic stem cell, 
from which all the cells of the circulating blood are eventually 
derived. Figure 32-2 shows the successive divisions of the pluripotential cells to form the different 
circulating blood cells. As these cells reproduce, a small portion of them remains exactly like the 
original pluripotential cells and is retained in the bone marrow to maintain a supply of these, although 
their numbers diminish with age. Most of the reproduced cells, however, differentiate to form the other 
cell types shown to the right in Figure 32-2. The intermediate-stage cells are very much like the 
pluripotential stem cells, even though they have already become committed to a particular line of cells 
and are called 
committedstem cells.
The different committed stem cells, when grown in culture, will 
produce colonies of specific types of blood cells. A committed stem cell that produces erythrocytes is 
called a 
colony-forming unit-erythrocyte, 
and the abbreviation CFU-E is used to designate this type of 
stem cell. Likewise, colony-forming units that form granulocytes and monocytes have the designation 
CFU-GM and so forth. Growth and reproduction of the different stem cells are controlled by multiple 

---

proteins called 
growth inducers. 
Four major growth inducers have been described, each having 
different characteristics. One of these, 
interleukin- 3, 
promotes growth and reproduction of virtually all 
the different types of committed stem cells, whereas the others induce growth of only specific types of 
cells.