The typical red cell makes too little vacuole material for coalescence to build the large vacuoles of pocked cells
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arXiv: 2610.22646v1 · Summary page
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Red-cell vacuoles face a materials shortage
Small internal cavities called vacuoles are common in red blood cells, while cells with large, visible vacuoles become much more frequent after the spleen is removed. One explanation holds that small cavities merge to make larger ones. A new simulation and modeling study finds that encounters are easy enough: in modeled flows, vacuoles met within a second. The difficulty is supplying enough material.
At the measured post-splenectomy production rate, all the vacuole material made by an average red cell over its lifetime would form a body only about 0.6 micrometers across—16 times smaller in volume than a 1.5-micrometer cavity. A population model instead points toward unusually high production in a small minority of cells as a way to explain the large cavities. Merging may still contribute, but cannot solve the average cell’s material shortage. The preprint also proposes a narrow-slit experiment to test whether brief encounters actually make vacuoles fuse.
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