The tangled mass of tubing, disks and light bulbs unveiled before a packed meeting of the Royal Society of scientists in London looked for all the world like an outsize example of abstract ...

The job of hemoglobin in our body seems to be quite simple: It transports oxygen molecules through our bloodstream. But this only works so well because the hemoglobin molecule is extremely complex.

Hemoglobin in the R quaternary structure binds oxygen with very nearly the same high affinity as the αβ dimer (that is, the half-molecule; Fig. 1), as well as the isolated α and β chains.

Hemoglobin structure. Hemoglobin is made up of four protein chains called globins. ... Each heme group can hold one oxygen molecule, which means one hemoglobin molecule can hold four oxygen molecules.

By night, he took another approach: constructing a 70,000-piece model of deoxyhemoglobin in his basement to study how the molecule’s structure influenced its role in sickle cell disease. Makio ...

Hemoglobin is made up of four protein chains that each bind an additional ring-shaped chemical structure called heme. Our red blood cells are red because of the heme groups in hemoglobin.

This article was originally published with the title “ A Universal Molecule of Living Matter ” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 199 No. 2 (August 1958), p. 77 doi:10.1038 ...