ABC, Yahoo! and others ran a story about a woman who had a liver transplant whose blood type ended up changing. I love stories like this.
Not because of the change itself. Most likely, stem cells traveled from the new liver to the patient’s bone marrow. There, the stem cells set up shop and gave her a new blood type.
What intrigues me is what these types of stories mean for solving crimes. Because changed blood type usually means changed blood DNA. In other words, her blood cells now have different DNA from the other cells in her body. This can really confound an investigation if the police aren’t careful.
Of course this was a very rare event. But bone marrow transplants aren’t. And every bone marrow transplant results in blood cells with different DNA compared to the rest of the recipient’s cells.