The high concentrations of electrol

The high concentrations of electrolytes and other solutes in the extracellular medium and the resulting cell dehydration during slow cooling have been proposed as a source of cell damage’“,4’. A number of specific mechanisms have been suggested to explain these so-called ‘solution effects’. Lovelock provided evidence that hypertonic salt solutions caused denaturation of lipoproteins, and that this process could induce haemolysis in red blood cells. Other theories have focussed on the potentially damaging effect of cell shrinkage as a response to a highly concentrated extracellular solution. Meryman4” proposed the existence of a critical minimum cell volume, shrinkage beyond which was presumed to be deleterious, while Steponkus et a1.44 showed that plasmalemma lipid can be deleted from the membrane during osmotic dehydration, and suggested that damage occurs during rehydration if there is insufficient membrane material for the cell to return to