Open AccessDiffusion and chemical reaction velocity as joint factors in determining the rate of uptake of oxygen and carbon monoxide by the red blood corpuscle
Author(s) -
F. J. W. Roughton
Publication year - 1932
Publication title -
proceedings of the royal society of london. series b, containing papers of a biological character
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2053-9185
pISSN - 0950-1193
DOI - 10.1098/rspb.1932.0041
Subject(s) - carbon monoxide , chemistry , oxygen , diffusion , carbon dioxide , hemoglobin , mixing (physics) , chemical reaction , tube (container) , volumetric flow rate , analytical chemistry (journal) , chromatography , thermodynamics , materials science , biochemistry , physics , catalysis , organic chemistry , quantum mechanics , composite material
In a paper on this subject published four years age, Hartridge and Roughton (1927) described some preliminary experiments upon the rate of uptake of oxygen and carbon monoxide by the red blood corpuscle, the observations being made by means of their reaction velocity technique (Hartridge and Roughton, 1922–1927). The general principles of the method were as follows. Through one lead of the apparatus a suspension of reduced corpuscles in saline was forces into the mixing chamber, whilst through the other lead was forced a solution of oxygen (or carbon monoxide) in saline. The two fluids mixed in the mixing chamber within 0·001 second or less and then travelled down the observation tube. Determination of the percentage of oxyhæmoglobin (or carboxyhæmoglobin) in the moving fluid at various cross sections of the observation tube was made by means of the reversion spectroscope, these measurements, together with a knowledge of the rate of flow of the fluid down the observation tube, giving the necessary data for plotting the rate of uptake of O2 or CO by the corpuscles against time. The most interesting feature of the results was the much slower uptake of O2 by hæmoglobin in the intact corpuscle as compared with the of O2 by hæmoglobin in laked solution as previously recorded by Hartridge and Roughton (1925). In the corpuscle experiments the time scale had to be expressed in hundredths of a second instead of in thousandths of a second as in the hæmoglobin solution experiments (vide fig. 2 of Hartridge and Roghton, 1927). Confirmatory results by somewhat different technique have been obtained lately by Dirken and Mook (1931). These will be referred to again later.