Blood is made up of cells and plasma, and is transported through blood vessels. Red blood cells carry oxygen, while white blood cells and platelets fight disease. Red blood cells have a unique shape and contain hemoglobin, which carries oxygen. They are highly efficient at transporting oxygen due to their shape and high concentration of hemoglobin.
Blood and blood vessels are the transportation system within the body of all mammals. Blood is made up of different types of cells suspended in plasma. Plasma consists mainly of water containing dissolved substances such as glucose, lipids and amino acids. The types of cells found in blood are red blood cells or red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets.
White blood cells are also called leukocytes. There are two main groups of white blood cells – phagocytes and lymphocytes – both of which are involved in fighting disease and infection. Platelets are not actually cells, but fragments of cells involved in blood clotting.
Red blood cells are also referred to as red blood cells, red blood cells, and erythrocytes. Their main function is to carry oxygen throughout the body. Red blood cells travel through the respiratory system to pick up oxygen and then move through blood vessels to other tissues in the body. The structure of red blood cells is modified for this function.
Erythrocytes have a distinct shape to allow large numbers of them to occur in the blood. They do not contain a nucleus and the center of the cell is sunken, which gives them the appearance of biconcave discs. If you look at a blood smear under a microscope, you will see many red blood cells, which are easy to spot as they look like donuts.
The inside of cells is filled with hemoglobin. This is a complex protein molecule that has four heme groups, which contain iron. Hemoglobin is red, which is what gives red blood cells their color. Furthermore, hemoglobin is the protein responsible for carrying oxygen in the blood. The fact that there is no nucleus allows there to be many more hemoglobin molecules in the cell.
When red blood cells pass through the lung, there is a higher concentration of oxygen molecules than inside the cells. Oxygen molecules diffuse across the corpuscular membrane and combine with hemoglobin to form oxyhemoglobin. Each of the four heme groups can combine with one oxygen molecule, so each hemoglobin can carry four oxygen molecules. As red blood cells pass from the tissues, the lower oxygen concentration causes the weak bond between oxygen and hemoglobin to break. Oxygen molecules easily detach from heme groups and diffuse out of red blood cells. The molecules then diffuse into the cells of other tissues that need them.
There can be up to 250 million hemoglobin molecules inside red blood cells. This means that a single cell can carry up to 100 million molecules of oxygen. The biconcave shape of red blood cells gives them a larger surface area, which means that the rate of oxygen absorption is much higher. All of these factors make it a highly efficient method of transporting oxygen throughout the body.
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