ABO Blood Group System - History of Discoveries

History of Discoveries

The ABO blood group system is widely credited to have been discovered by the Austrian scientist Karl Landsteiner, who found three different blood types in 1900; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1930 for his work. Due to inadequate communication at the time it was subsequently found that Czech serologist Jan Janský had independently pioneered the classification of human blood into four groups, but Landsteiner's independent discovery had been accepted by the scientific world while Janský remained in relative obscurity. Janský's classification is however still used in Russia and states of former USSR (see below). In America, Moss published his own (very similar) work in 1910.

Landsteiner described A, B, and O; Alfred von Decastello and Adriano Sturli discovered the fourth type, AB, in 1902. Ludwik Hirszfeld and E. von Dungern discovered the heritability of ABO blood groups in 1910–11, with Felix Bernstein demonstrating the correct blood group inheritance pattern of multiple alleles at one locus in 1924. Watkins and Morgan, in England, discovered that the ABO epitopes were conferred by sugars, to be specific, N-acetylgalactosamine for the A-type and galactose for the B-type. After much published literature claiming that the ABH substances were all attached to glycosphingolipids, Laine's group (1988) found that the band 3 protein expressed a long polylactosamine chain that contains the major portion of the ABH substances attached. Later, Yamamoto's group showed the precise glycosyl transferase set that confers the A, B and O epitopes.