Lambda

Thank you. Clear, easily understood explanations of questions I always wondered. 👍🏼

Whenever I see this image I always wonder 2 things:

1. What makes hemoglobin more efficient?
2. Why do we even need these fancy molecules to transport oxygen? Can’t we produce some kind of biological ampule that holds some pure O2 for consumption by the various processes that need it? We have dedicated organelle structures for similar tasks (i.e. mitochondria)

Apparently it’s not even really all that stable, so that whole container would rapidly decompose into probably carbon dioxide (CO2) and a bunch of pure carbon (think charcoal). At least that’s my hunch. There is a Wikipedia article on the stuff, but it’s pretty short, since it’s a pretty unusual chemical (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicarbon_monoxide ).

CO2 is of course extremely common. I’d love to see what a chemist can describe about a bottle of C2O though!