Raman difference spectroscopy measurements on native and chemically modified human deoxyhemoglobins stabilized in either the R or the T quaternary structure revealed frequency differences in the oxidation state marker lines. The differences indicate that the R structure has an effective increase in the electron density of the antibonding 7r* orbitals of the porphyrin rings. This increase is explained by a charge transfer interaction between donor orbitals and the lr* orbitals of the porphyrins. The relative amount of charge transferred, which is inferred from the Raman difference measurements, correlates with some but not all factors that influence the energetics of toe quaternary structure equilibrium. In addition, the free energy of cooperativity for a variety of ligated proteins follows the same order as that of the degree of charge depletion of the r* orbitals upon ligation as determined from the frequency of a Raman mode. The proposed electronic interaction between the protein and heme could result in energies large enough to provide a significant contribution to the energetics of hemoglobin cooperativity.The understanding of the molecular basis for cooperativity in the oxygenation of hemoglobin depends on being able to identify the origin of the difference, AG, in free energy of ligand binding between the low-affinity (T) and high-affinity (R) quaternary structures (1, 2). AG has been proposed by some to be lqalized at the heme (3) and by others to be distributed throughout the protein (4-6). We find evidence for a protein-heme interaction and we conclude that there is a contribution to AG, the free energy of cooperativity, which is detected at the porphyrin. This evidence, derived from Raman difference spectroscopy (RDS), suggests that AG contains an electronic stabilization energy resulting from a charge transfer interaction.Pue to resonance enhancement, the heme protein Raman spectra obtained with visible excitation frequencies contain only those vibrational modes associated with the porphyrin macrocycle. Consequently protein influences on the properties of the prirphyrin ring may be studied by comparing the resonance Raman spectrum of molecules in which there are differences in the structure of the protein. In previous resonance Raman scattering studies of deoxyhemoglobins (7-11), which have attempted to locate bond strain and test cooperativity models, no differences in the Raman frequencies between the two quaternary structures were found. However, the lower limit for the detection of reliable frequency differences in hemoglobin has been about 1-2 cm-l. Recently Shelnutt et al. (12) reported on a RDS technique in which they reliably detected frequency differences as small as 0.1 cm-l in cytochromes c by simultaneously acquiring the Raman spectrum of two samples and by subsequent data processing on a minicomputer. We have now used this technique to compare native deoxyhemoglobin in the T structure and chemically modified deoxyhemoglobins stabilized in either the R or T structures.
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