Star Trek

Hemeglobin is the iron containing stuff that makes your blood red. It transports oxygen to the parts of your body. I’m wondering if a carbon based life form could use copper in their hemeglobin to transport oxygen instead of iron? Vulcan’s use copper which makes their blood green. Is this biologically possible?

Not sure but is looks cool.......

It seems like it would be..... The copper could just have a diferent way of transporting the oxygen.


Otherwise...............IT WAS ON STAR TREK SO IT’S POSSIBLE OKAY??????????????????

j/k :)

Iron can transport oxygen because iron reacts with oxygen (oxidation - rust). Copper also oxidizes and when it does it creates a green-tinted residue; hence, green vulcan blood :)

(I have limited bological expertese)

It tends not to happen on earth, a organism will adapt to give it the best chance of survival, I would guess that we use iron because it is widely available, in the soil in food we eat, in the food that eats the food with iron... If we depended on copper it would be difficult to find copper rich sources of food and we would die out,

(I do have a nice fair of chemistry)
iron is far more reactive with oxygen that copper is, so its far easier to use it to transport oxygen around in a nice little ionic molecule, infact if I was to put a bit of iron in a copper solution the iron would react to form its own solution leaving the copper in the place of where the iron reacted, basic copper plating, (there is a name for this but it escapes me for now)
so given a choice nature would choose iron, BUT since your asking is it possible, I would have to say yes, under the right conditions it would be most likely possible, mind you copper rich vulcan food would properly be poisoness to us...

I do like the idea of how to explain green blood that was introduced in the TOS, it made a funny kind of sense....

infact I cant even spell biological, :-)

Iron doesn’t transport Oxygen around. Hemoglobulin is a 4 subunit protein. Iron helps to hold the 4 subunits together, and the oxygen molecules are held in an active site in the center of the 4 subunit structure. It’s not held by ionic or covalent bonds.

Sickle cell anemia for example is when hemoglobulin is mutated and only forms a 3 subunit protein. It’s no longer a square shape, but a sort of "L" shape like a sickle.

These mutated proteins clog things up and don’t transport oxygen well.

I’m not exactly sure about Iron’s roll in the transport, but I know that ionic bonds are not formed.