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We have studied the metabolism of platelets in vitro using washed platelets. Oxygen uptake and fuel utilization were measured. It was found that glucose is never oxidized to any significant extent and is always converted to lactate, regardless of oxygen availability. Oxidative metabolism fuels 70-100% of the ATP turnover, and oxygen uptake is the same whether the platelet is consuming glucose, acetate or only an unidentified endogenous fuel. When acetate is the added fuel, no endogenous fuel is oxidized, whereas the addition of glucose results in sparing of only 8% of endogenous fuel. Preliminary storage experiments using plasma-free media show that an acetate-containing buffered salt solution provided excellent storage conditions and that a medium without any exogenous fuel is better than one containing glucose. Thus we conclude that a successful storage medium should contain minimal amounts of glucose, and an oxidizable fuel such as acetate, in order to supplement the endogenous one.

The Pasteur effect and the associated acidosis have long been considered a major cause of platelet death during storage. We have investigated this phenomenon using a defined platelet preparation and a system whereby the oxidative and glycolytic contributions to total ATP production can be measured over a range of oxygen concentrations from saturating (pO2 = 158 mmHg) to anoxic (pO2 = 0 mmHg). Platelets do not show a Pasteur effect until the pO2 decreases to < 2.0 mmHg, whereupon lactate production increases 1.5-fold. The Pasteur effect is therefore not a likely cause of platelet death during storage where pO2 in a storage bag typically drops to no less than 50 mmHg. The data also have implications for the role of oxygen diffusion in oxidative metabolism, and for the compensatory nature of the Pasteur effect. As platelets are relatively small cells, and the onset of the Pasteur effect occurs at a relatively low oxygen concentration, diffusion may limit the rate of oxygen consumption in most other (larger) cells. The Pasteur effect is only fully compensative if the P/O2 ratio used for the calculations is lower than the conventional one. Since recent research strongly suggests that the conventional P/O2 ratio is too high, examples of fully compensative Pasteur effects may be more common than the literature suggests.

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