We love blood groups!

My field of interest and a source of research inspiration is the study of human blood groups, as they apply to Transfusion Medicine and also to the biology of the red blood cell and its interactions. I am truly a translational scientist with one foot in the clinical laboratory (KIT, Labmedicin Skåne), where the focus is providing the right blood to the right patient and developing tests to make that easier; and the other in the research lab, investigating the genes that encode proteins on the red blood cell surface, and how changes in the proteins can affect the way the red blood cells interact.

I have project-specific funding from the Crafoord and Alfred Österlund Foundations to investigate the function of SMIM1, a small highly conserved protein in the red cell membrane that we discovered in 2013. It is associated with the blood group antigen, Vel, which is clinically important in Transfusion Medicine but its function remains a mystery. One hypothesis is that SMIM1 might be important for intracellular survival of malarial parasites (Plasmodium spp.), and I am collaborating with Associate Professor Kristina Persson, a consultant in the Clinical Chemistry department who is an expert in malarial invasion of red blood cells.