Red blood cell metabolism: a window on systems health towards clinical metabolomics

This review focuses on recent advances in the understanding of red blood cell (RBC) metabolism as a function of hypoxia and oxidant stress. In particular, we will focus on RBC metabolic alterations during storage in the blood bank, a medically relevant model of erythrocyte responses to energy and redox stress.

Recent studies on over 13 000 healthy blood donors, as part of the Recipient Epidemiology and Donor Evaluation Study (REDS) III and IV-P RBC omics, and 525 diversity outbred mice have highlighted the impact on RBC metabolism of biological factors (age, BMI), genetics (sex, polymorphisms) and exposure (dietary, professional or recreational habits, drugs that are not grounds for blood donor deferral).

We review RBC metabolism from basic biochemistry to storage biology, briefly discussing the impact of inborn errors of metabolism and genetic factors on RBC metabolism, as a window on systems metabolic health. Expanding on the concept of clinical chemistry towards clinical metabolomics, monitoring metabolism at scale in large populations (e.g., millions of blood donors) may thus provide insights into population health as a complementary tool to genetic screening and standard clinical measurements.