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Dielectric properties and oxygenation of hemoglobin
Author(s) -
Hanss Maxime,
Banerjee Ramalprasad
Publication year - 1967
Publication title -
biopolymers
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.556
H-Index - 125
eISSN - 1097-0282
pISSN - 0006-3525
DOI - 10.1002/bip.1967.360051002
Subject(s) - hemoglobin , dielectric , oxygenation , chemistry , degree (music) , ionic strength , analytical chemistry (journal) , materials science , biochemistry , chromatography , physics , aqueous solution , medicine , optoelectronics , acoustics
Dielectric properties of human and horse hemoglobin were studied at frequencies ranging from 20 kc./sec. to 7 Mc./sec. The relative errors in the measurements were usually less than 10 −3 even for mildly conducting solutions (10 −3 M KCl). The experimental setup allowed us variation and measurement of the degree of oxygenation of the protein and to determine its dielectric parameters. Our main conclusion is that it was not possible to find any variation of the dielectric increment for hemoglobin oxygenation levels of 25, 50, 75, and 100%, approximately. This result is at variance with some previous reports. We cannot give the reason for this discrepancy but discuss some possible explanations. The specific dielectric increment, Δε s /c, of human hemoglobin was shown to be significantly smaller than that of horse hemoglobin (0.28 against 0.32). This physical property is lowered with increasing ionic strength I : Δε s /c = 0.28 and 0.20 for I = 10 −4 and 10 −3 , respectively (human protein).