What is an Antibody in Blood?

Video Transcript

"The next phase in the laboratory is an instrument that does what we call anti-body screening, trying not to get too technical. Your blood group, if you are a group "A" person then in your plasma you will have an anti-body called "anti-B". That's why you can't give A-blood to B-person, and B-person to A. Therefore, the B-person will have anti-A, the O-person will have both anti-A and anti-B, and the AB-person has neither and that's where the concept of universal donors and universal recipients come in. So those anti-bodies are significant because they will latch onto a red cell. So if you transfuse that into a person of a different type, let's say this is a red cell that anti-body will clamp onto that red cell. Then what it does in the body is it will either clump all the cells together and you end up with like strokes all over, or it ruptures the red cell and releases the free hemoglobin which carries the oxygen, very very toxic to the body. So we want to be sure that we don't introduce any of those unexpected anti-bodies into a patient that's going to get blood. So we call those, I said, unexpected anti-bodies so how do we get those unexpected ones. Generally, mothers that have babies is the most common way to do that. Because half of the baby is not of her cell type, that's the father's type, so she can then recognize anything that is different. Your body will develop an anti-body to that, some people know about the RH Negative mother with the anti-D that has a hemalic disease for the baby. Well you can also develop about thirty other anti-bodies and that happens usually through transfusion. So, a patient that has had transfusions or tissue transplants all those in the body can be foreign and your body will develop an anti-body, develop against that."