Hypoxia in blood samples? - (Jan/24/2011 )

For our experiment we wanted to do a time curve of treatment on whole blood. Because we wanted to prevent hypoxia, we did not just leave our tubes standing in the incubator but instead transferred the blood to flasks with vented caps and left them shaking in the incubator.

When we perform microarray analysis, we see genes like HIF1A, IL1A, IL1B, NFKBIA going up after 3h (suggesting hypoxia??), whereas other hypoxia genes (FOS, CITED2, MKP-1) go down in control conditions (no treatment). With going up and down I mean like 5-fold or more.

Anybody has any idea what may be happening? Is it possible that under the conditions we used that hypoxia occurred?

Sure, it depends on how well the blood was being mixed with the ambient air - remember that in the body the lungs provide a huge surface area to ensure that the blood is fully oxygenated.

and maybe how deep your samples sat in the vessel. Can O2 penetrates fast enough? Remember you do have a low of cells in the blood who need a lot O2, as you may imagine....