Extracellular hemoglobin and its degradation products, free heme and iron, are highly toxic due to oxidative stress induction and decrease in nitric oxide availability.
Hb and its degradation products – free heme and iron - perpetuate oxidative stress, and together with decreased NO availability promote many SCD complications.
It is well known that in the presence of H2O2 hemoglobin exhibits a peroxidase-like activity, catalyzed by the heme moiety.
Macrophages and liver cells capture large HP-Hb complexes clearing the plasma from free hemoglobin.
Red blood cell hemolysis in sickle cell disease (SCD) releases free hemoglobin.
Extracellular Hb exhibits a highly toxic nature by scavenging Nitric Oxide (NO) that reduces its bioavailability [1].
However, no changes in peroxidase activity were observed after incubation with haptoglobin or hemopexin (Fig. 2).
At the same time, heme bound to NEAT does not catalyze the peroxidase reaction due to inability to interact with H2O2.
This ability of NEAT can decrease the level of NO scavenging and oxidative stress in SCD.
Our data demonstrate a significant decrease in peroxidase activity of hemoglobin incubated with NEATHP, indicating heme transfer.
Therefore, we demonstrated that an active scavenging of heme by NEAT can reduce peroxidase activity of hemoglobin, whereas passive scavengers cannot.
It is seen in Fig. 2 that after incubation with NEAT-HP, Hb has decreased the heme content by 85%, which confirms heme removal ability of NEAT-HP construct.
Moreover, heme scavenging by NEAT-HP markedly decreased hemoglobin-mediated peroxidase activity (Fig. 2), whereas haptoglobin was capable of only a small attenuation of peroxidase activity and hemopexin did not affect it at all.
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If you find BEL Commons useful in your work, please consider citing: Hoyt, C. T., Domingo-Fernández, D., & Hofmann-Apitius, M. (2018). BEL Commons: an environment for exploration and analysis of networks encoded in Biological Expression Language. Database, 2018(3), 1–11.