Poor transportation, or expired tubes!

Hello, not only are they black but if I see well the separator stuff is stil at the bottom of the tube. Are they conserved properly ? are they hemolysed ? is there any possibility of anilin intox or strong reduction of the blood ?

I honestly have no idea if they were conserved properly as they are sent in from an outside party. They're often hemolysed but they've never looked like this before. I heard from the people that send them in and they said that they had opened a new pack of tubes for all but 1 of the samples, so assuming that the 1 sample that spun normally was from the other pack it's probably something with those tubes.

I have seen this problem with cattle bled from a tail vein. We first thought it was the tubes or handling. What has happened with us is that some fecal material is picked up by the needle and contaminates the tube. I isolated a couple of Staphs, a couple of Streps, E coli and a bacilllis from my haemolysed blood. Try plating out a loop full onto blood agar plates and incubate at 37C. Surprisingly, often they are pure cultures. Add some bugs back to fresh blood, incubate overnight and you will probably have hemolysed blood.

I agree that this looks like the result of complete hemolysis. I doubt that expired tubes are the reason; I think that most Vacutainer-type tubes are stable for quite a long time, regardless of what their label says. Bacterial contamination strikes me as a more likely explanation.

Thank you! I will pass that information along. That makes perfect sense.

I fully agree with the theory of contamination and autolisis. If you have a look at the cap of the tubes, traces of dry blood are visible on the outside. This probably means that the tubes were opened to collect the blood from the tail. If this was the case (as it is done with breeding pigs), samples were probably heavily contaminated in origin.

I would suggest go back to the flock, and get fresh/sterile samples from the same animals for testing.

Could be due hemolysis of RBC

In small animal practice, I have seen this happen with tubes that were spun too soon after draw and the sample didn't have time to clot (probably not the case here since the samples are sent in from an outside source). Spinning it, even multiple times, just turned the whole sample into a clotted mess and the gel separator wouldn't move. Our solution was to resuspend the sample by stirring gently with a wooden stirrer (usually the wooden end of a cotton-tip applicator), and re-centrifuging would suspend everything properly.

This It has been associated with Clostridium infections and another anaerobic bacteria?

We found in buffaloes and cattle sera sometime, the white that look like jelly, we though that it's because of individual animal may be related with feed at that time, let try with go back and take new sample or other wise check with biochemistry lab. Sometime we got a little bit of sera beside jelly.

It could be that that whole blood was frozen after collection, when on ice, or during storage before processing. Check the temperature of your refrigerator. When blood freezes, it turns black because the red blood cells all lyse and you may be able to recover some serum, but it will be deep red or black in color. Often no serum will be recoverable.

hi iam agree with richard s green it is cotaminate with the bacteria .you must add antibiotic into your tube .i have seen this when we bled from donkey for making

a control blood for calibration of our insturmation you can add a little streptomycine and penicilin to your test tube before collecting blood

Methemoglobin, myoglobin, and methemalbumin can cause abnormal dark color in patient samples. Methemalbumin is formed when albumin binds excess hemin (oxidized free heme). Check for the Lipemic index too where it maybe increased.