Oxygen carrying capability evaluation based on direct electrochemistry of highly loaded hemoglobin spheres

Hemoglobin-based oxygen carriers (HBOCs) are widely researched as blood substitute and mainly produced based on templates. As reported, their optimal size should be preferably less than 1 aem and more than 100 nm, but porous calcium carbonate (CaCO3) is the most common template to synthesis HBOCs and their average size is larger than 3 aem. Therefore, in this study, we employed manganese carbonate (MnCO3) instead of CaCO3 for the production of much smaller multilayer hemoglobin (Hb) sphere with glutaraldehyde (GA) as the crosslinking agent. According to our previous work, the obtained {Hb/GA} n nanospheres were also immobilized on chitosan modified glassy carbon electrode (GCE) to evaluate their oxygen-carrying ability with electrochemical techniques. By comparison, {Hb/GA}(5) demonstrates a higher sensitivity to oxygen, stronger carrying-oxygen ability and more stable properties than {Hb/GA}(1). The present work suggests potential applications of HBOCs as blood substitute. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.