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> CO2 is a 'special' gas in my book because its transport in the > body is unusual and not what was stated above. Haemoglobin does not > bind CO2, only O2 and CO. [Good description of CO2 transport deleted] > Peter David I hate to nit pick, but Hb does participate in transport of CO2; CO2 binds the protein part of Hb (globin) to form Carbamino Hemoglobin. This does indeed mean that Hb is capable of transporting both O2 and Co2 at the same time. However, Hb is capable of combining with more CO2 than HbO2 is. Some notes I have place the three CO2 transport mechanisms at the following capacities (sea level, resting): (some rounding) Dissolved (plasma + red cell combined): 4.8% Carbamino compunds: 4.9% HCO3-: 91% Quite a while ago, I had built a small model of this exact gas transport problem, and we showed that at elevated pressure and workloads, several interesting things were possible: 1) Potential for Hypoxia 2) O2 DCS hits are possible (!) 3) O2 and CO2 may play a very large role in narcosis, possibly much greater than ever guessed. 4) O2 transport via plasma becomes important at elevated pressure 5) Buffer systems are heavily taxed at elevated pressures 6) Free radical production is increased at elevated pressures, and this likely brings on a whole set of other problems. This work was never published, as I was/am primarily interested in the programming system I ues for building these types of models; this just happened to be an interesting model to explore. Perhaps I will revisit it, in light of the (now much greater) interest. (Translation: No, I can't back up the points 1-6 above right now, so you can go ahead and ignore them. But perhaps I'll come back and say "told you so." :-) -frank -- fhd@pa*.co* | I --- am a vision. 1 212 559 5534 | I am --- television. 1 917 992 2248 | -- Bono ad-libbing lyrics live on the U2 Zoo-TV 1 718 746 7061 | tour.
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