Researchers from multiple institutions in China have found a way to use gene editing to reactivate dormant fetal oxygen-transporting proteins in adult blood cells to potentially reverse a wide range of blood disorders.
A series of laboratory studies is underway in the United States to improve gene therapy worldwide for sickle cell disease, a complex and sometimes deadly heritable blood disorder that dramatically affects the structure and ...
Researchers report a system that quantitatively measures cell volume, hemoglobin mass, and oxygen saturation in individual red blood cells. They found that oxygen affinity is different for individual red blood cells. These ...
(Medical Xpress)—Researchers in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, have recently made some significant advances in developing artificial blood substitutes. Their formulation is based not on synthetic hemoglobins, but rather on hemerythrin ...
(Medical Xpress)—Blood transfusions are supposed to save lives. Doctors give transfusions to severely ill or injured people with the expectation that their conditions will improve. In fact, transfusions do not always help ...
(Medical Xpress)—Many diseases are multifactorial and can not be understood by simple molecular associations alone. Alzheimer's disease (AD)is associated with toxic transformations in two classes of protein,amyloid beta ...
(Medical Xpress) -- Malaria is a disease caused by parasites passed to humans via the bites of infected mosquitoes. Globally, the disease causes over a million deaths every year, and is especially rife in parts of Africa ...
An investigational combination of drugs already approved to treat obesity, migraine and epilepsy produced up to a 10 percent weight loss in obese individuals participating in a one-year clinical trial, according to researchers ...
Apr 11, 2011
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New research published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that stem cell gene therapy may offer a promising, curative treatment for the painful, inherited blood disorder sickle cell disease (SCD).
Aug 30, 2023
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Gene therapy that alters hemoglobin genes may be an answer to curing sickle cell disease (SCD) and beta thalassemia. These two common life-threatening anemias afflict millions of individuals across the globe.
Jun 29, 2023
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Hemoglobin (English pronunciation: /hiːməˈɡloʊbɪn/; also rendered as haemoglobin and abbreviated Hb or Hgb) is the iron-containing oxygen-transport metalloprotein in the red blood cells of all vertebrates, with the exception of the fish family Channichthyidae, as well as the tissues of some invertebrates. Hemoglobin in the blood carries oxygen from the respiratory organs (lungs or gills) to the rest of the body (i.e., the tissues) where it releases the oxygen to burn nutrients to provide energy to power the functions of the organism, and collects the resultant carbon dioxide to bring it back to the respiratory organs to be dispensed from the organism.
In mammals, the protein makes up about 97% of the red blood cells' dry content, and around 35% of the total content (including water).[citation needed] Hemoglobin has an oxygen binding capacity of 1.34 ml O2 per gram of hemoglobin, which increases the total blood oxygen capacity seventy-fold compared to dissolved oxygen in blood. The mammalian hemoglobin molecule can bind (carry) up to four oxygen molecules.
Hemoglobin is involved in the transport of other gases: it carries some of the body's respiratory carbon dioxide (about 10% of the total) as carbaminohemoglobin, in which CO2 is bound to the globin protein. The molecule also carries the important regulatory molecule nitric oxide bound to a globin protein thiol group, releasing it at the same time as oxygen.
Hemoglobin is also found outside red blood cells and their progenitor lines. Other cells that contain hemoglobin include the A9 dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, macrophages, alveolar cells, and mesangial cells in the kidney. In these tissues, hemoglobin has a non-oxygen-carrying function as an antioxidant and a regulator of iron metabolism.
Hemoglobin and hemoglobin-like molecules are also found in many invertebrates, fungi, and plants. In these organisms, hemoglobins may carry oxygen, or they may act to transport and regulate other things such as carbon dioxide, nitric oxide, hydrogen sulfide and sulfide. A variant of the molecule, called leghemoglobin, is used to scavenge oxygen, to keep it from poisoning anaerobic systems, such as nitrogen-fixing nodules of leguminous plants.
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