Comment on Colours of Blood
BreadOven@lemmy.world 6 days agoCO2 and H2CO3 (apparently I don’t know how to do subscript on here.
Comment on Colours of Blood
BreadOven@lemmy.world 6 days agoCO2 and H2CO3 (apparently I don’t know how to do subscript on here.
InverseParallax@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Yeah, I didn’t do the carbonic acid, then there’s the increased bicarb buffering around the pleura, couple other facts.
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539815/
Thus the acidity causes o2 release. Temperature (lungs tend to be very cold in the body) is important too.
It’s amazing how subtly it works to gently increase efficiency where we need it. Otherwise it’s just a very weak oxygen bond (which is hard enough given oxygen is extremely non-polar and all you have are the valence pairs.
www.jbc.org/article/…/fulltext
Wow, I’m impressed, they’re using spin-coupling which is a pretty dicey effect.
That’s some fucking crazy ass engineering by nature, A weak, highly reversible bond with the molecule keyed to both pH and thermal triggers. That was a fun rabbit hole.
Macros@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days ago
Thanks so much for the deep dive. I love learning from such concise facts.
To add, also @Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com : There is only one known species of vertebrates without hemoglobin. The Crocodile Icefish, it once had it in its blood and lost some genes to synthesize it. The debate about why is still ongoing, with the currently favored theory that they adapted to a high oxygen and low iron environment.
Semjaza@lemmynsfw.com 6 days ago
Thanks for the callout and link! 🙏🏽
Nature is fascinating.