 Hey everybody Lance Goyki here, and today I want to talk about a protein that floats around in your blood and carries oxygen to your exercising muscle. Now this protein is hemoglobin, and you may have heard of hemoglobin. It's comprised of four different subunits or well two by two different subunits. There's two alpha subunits and two beta subunits. Subunits are just they're polypeptides. They're like they're like tiny proteins. They could be proteins on their own kind of technically, but as they come together, they form this very specific hemoglobin shape that we know. And pro-tip for all you biochemistry students, shape determines function. So shape is really really important. Now interconnectivity between molecules is actually what determines shape. So that's where chemistry gets really complex and that's where you got to kind of stay on top of it. So we're gonna talk about that a little bit. Now, as we breathe in, oxygen comes into the blood, but the blood would be saturated with oxygen really really quickly. So this hemoglobin allows us to store more oxygen in our blood because it takes it out of the the liquid part of it and carries it to the tissues that we need. But the caveat is that if you have hemoglobin that's really really good at hanging on to oxygen and really really bad at letting go of it, you would die because you wouldn't have oxygen for your tissues. Your brain needs oxygen, your muscles need oxygen to work, all this stuff, right? So how does it work? Well in the lungs, the pH is relatively higher of your blood and the pH of your blood is relatively lower in exercise in muscle tissue, for example. pH. So muscle is more acidic, the lungs are more basic or more alkaline. Now, okay, so oxygen comes into the blood, hemoglobin picks it up because it's really good at picking it up in the lungs and it comes to this tissue and it gets to this exercising tissue that's really fatigued. There's a bunch of hydrogen ions as byproducts to exercise and pH is lower. So those hydrogen ions actually loosen the grip on oxygen. It's really really cool. Like chemistry is pretty sweet. It loosens the grip so it can release the the oxygen to your tissue and now you can use it at the end of your electron transport chain to produce more energy, more ATP, usable ATP. So that's the basic premise. There are other things that influence the shape of hemoglobin, one of them being temperature. So exercising muscle is also really warm. So not only does this pH play into it, but also the temperature that is increasing in the tissue also loosens that grip and there's one more basic one. So we've got pH, we've got temperature and now we've got BPG or bisphosphoglycerate. Now there are a couple different forms of bisphosphoglycerate but all you need to know is that it's a byproduct of glycolysis. Glycolysis helps us produce energy. So if I'm trying to run through glycolysis a lot, but my electron transport chain, my oxygen supply cannot keep up with it. It can't pull these byproducts along this energy systems pathway. So what happens is BPG builds up on the front end of these reactions and that will then circulate and change the shape of the hemoglobin so that it loosens its grip on oxygen. Really, really cool stuff. So that's the basics of we might call this the Bohr effect. There is probably a better name for it. I hate eponyms that name things because they don't describe anything at all, but I do know it as the Bohr effect. If you know the other name for it, leave that in the comments below and did I miss anything? Is there anything you want to, you know, maybe elaborate upon a little bit? Also leave that in the comments below. I would love to hear from you. I would love to have a little discussion about this and as always don't forget to smash that like button.