Corpuscular Information and Courses from MediaLab, Inc.
These are the MediaLab courses that cover Corpuscular and links to relevant pages within the course.
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| Appearance of the Erythrocyte Erythrocytes are non-nucleated, round, biconcave, disc-shaped cells They are 6.7 to 7.7μ in diameter, 2μ thick, and have an average volume (Mean Corpuscular Volume, MCV) of 80-100μ3. | View Page |
| Normal Red Cells Normal red cells are seen in this field. Mature erythrocytes can be described as round, elastic, non-nucleated, bi-concave discs which appear buff colored on Wright's stained smears. Notice that many of the cells have an area of central pallor which covers about one-third of the cell. The pallor occurs as a result of the disc-shaped cells being spread on the slide. Normal mature red blood cells have an average diameter of 7.2 microns with a range of 6-9 microns. This is approximately the same size as the nucleus of a small lymphocyte, which is often used as a guideline when determining the size of the red cells on a slide.
The average thickness of a normal mature red blood cell is 2.1 microns with a mean corpuscular volume (MCV) of 87 cubic mircons/femtoliters. | View Page |
| Erythrocytes Erythrocytes, when spread on a glass slide, show varying degrees of central pallor as noted in the previous exercise. This central pallor is related to the hemoglobin concentration present in the red cells.When viewing normal mature red cells, the central area (one-third of the cell) is white, while buff-colored hemoglobin is visible in the outer two-thirds of the cell. The mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (MCHC, 32-36 gm/dl of red blood cells), is the indice value which is used to verify the presence of adequate hemoglobin concentration in the cells visible on the peripheral smear. | View Page |