Help yourself to study about the red blood cell by following these free and printable red blood cell diagrams! These cell diagrams are designed to guide you in studying the red blood cell structures. Follow our diagrams and make sure to save them!
Red blood cell, also called erythrocyte, give the blood its characteristic color and carry oxygen from the lungs to the tissues. The mature human red blood cell is small, round, and biconcave; it appears dumbbell-shaped in profile. The cell is flexible and assumes a bell shape as it passes through extremely small blood vessels. It is covered with a membrane composed of lipids and proteins, lacks a nucleus, and contains hemoglobin —a red, iron-rich protein that binds oxygen. As you can see in the red blood cell diagram above, there are three types of red blood cells: hypertonic, isotonic, and hypotonic. More cell diagrams of red blood are posted below.
Red blood cells have a unique structure. Their flexible disc shape helps increase the surface area-to-volume ratio of these extremely small cells. This enables oxygen and carbon dioxide to diffuse across the red blood cell’s plasma membrane more readily. Red blood cells contain enormous amounts of a protein called hemoglobin. This iron containing molecule binds oxygen as oxygen molecules enter blood vessels in the lungs. Hemoglobin is also responsible for the characteristic red color of blood. Unlike other cells of the body, mature red blood cells do not contain a nucleus, mitochondria, or ribosomes. The absence of these cell structures leaves room for the hundreds of millions of hemoglobin molecules found in red blood cells.
The function of the red cell and its hemoglobin is to carry oxygen from the lungs or gills to all the body tissues and to carry carbon dioxide, a waste product of metabolism, to the lungs, where it is excreted. With all the details, make sure you learn well the cell structures of red blood. All pictures provided are the teaching resources of cell diagrams and you can also find other educational diagrams by browsing through our categories or look it up in the search column in our site!