Heme proteins carbon monoxide binding

The structural and functional integrity of organoclay-wrapped Mb and Hb molecules was demonstrated by retention of the secondary protein structure as well as distinctive shifts in the absorption spectra associated with oxygen or carbon monoxide binding to the heme metallocenter. The latter indicated that the wrapped... 

The CYPs, the carbon monoxide-binding pigments of microsomes, are heme proteins of the b cytochrome type. Originally described as a single protein, there are now known to be more than 2000 CYPs widely distributed throughout animals, plants, and microorganisms. A system of nomenclature utilizing the prefix CYP has been devised... 

Carbon monoxide binds readily to iron(II), but not iron(III), porphyrins to form complexes that are quite distinctive in terms of the spectral properties both of the heme and of the bound CO. Thus, CO has been widely used as a probe of the active site of heme proteins (113,... 

Significant differences in the equilibrium constants for carbon monoxide binding to cytochromes P450 from bacterial, liver microsomal, and adrenal cortex microsomal sources, different isozymes of the liver microsomal proteins, and for substrate-free and substrate-bound enzymes, have been observed and have been related to similar factors that affect O2 and CO binding in oxygen transport and storage heme proteins. The importance of the cis and tmns effects, that is electronic effects associated with the porphyrin... 

The most numerous and most complex monooxygenation reactions are those employing a type of heme protein called cytochrome P-450. This cytochrome is usually present in the smooth ER rather than the mitochondria. Like mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase, cytochrome P-450 can react with 02 and bind carbon monoxide, but it can be differentiated from cytochrome oxidase because the carbon monoxide complex of its reduced form absorbs light strongly at 450 ran—thus the name P-450. 

At the present time we have no certain knowledge of the state of the heme in these 450 nm species. We do not know if there are heme aggregates although they are unlikely. It is therefore reasonable to look at systems where the haem is aggregated as well as those where it is not in order to see how the absorption spectra can be mimic-ed. It seems reasonable to assume that the iron is low-spin in the carbon monoxide, isocyanide, and nitric oxide complexes as no high-spin iron complexes of this type are known. In the high-spin or low-spin state it may be that the thiol is weakly bound, if at all, for Fe(II) heme in models or in hemoglobin does not bind to thiols. In an attempt to understand these spectra we shall use a semi-empirical approach based on the theoretical discussion in the previous article (52) and elaborated in what follows immediately. Only Fe(II) complexes will be analysed as the Fe(III) proteins have been previously examined (52). 

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