When you get hurt or for any reason blood comes out of your body, why is the blood red in color? Have you ever thought about that? Or why the veins in your skin look blue? It all depends on some colorful chemistry in your body’s red blood cells.Red blood cells contain a substance called hemoglobin, which binds and carries oxygen throughout our body. This hemoglobin gives our blood its red color. Hemoglobin is made up of four protein chains that each contain an additional ring-shaped chemical structure called a hemetrusted source.Hemoglobin contains the heme group and it is because of this that the blood gets its red color. In turn, our blood is red because of the millions of red blood cells it contains.
Metals are important
Hemoglobin, which is in red blood cells, and the protein chains in it are encoded by our genes. Mutations in globin genes can cause diseases such as thalassemia and sickle cell disease.
To bind oxygen, each protein chain binds to a heme group, allowing a maximum of four oxygen molecules to bind to each hemoglobin molecule.
An iron molecule sits in the center of the heme. Iron causes the heme to appear reddish-brown. But what if this iron is exchanged for a different metal?
Remember those green flames in chemistry class? Plant leaves are green because the chlorophyll in the leaves contains magnesium in the center of the ring. Meanwhile, in cold-blooded animals, the blood appears blue because the copper atoms sit in the center of the ring and bind to oxygen.
Construction and body
To return to human blood, the iron in hemoglobin binds to oxygen in the lungs as we breathe air. Now, our blood appears bright red as it is pumped from the lungs to the tissues of our body.
Fortunately, oxygen binding is reversible, meaning that oxygen taken up in the lungs is released into the tissues as the blood circulates around the body.
When oxygen is released, it is replaced by carbon dioxide, which is then carried to our lungs and expelled from our body as we breathe. When carbon dioxide binds to hemoglobin, the color changes from bright red to dark red with a hint of purple reliable source.
But why do our veins look blue? This is an illusion; The veins themselves are white-pink. The reliable source of the blue color we see with our eyes is a combination of blood, blood vessels, skin, and the processes that allow us to see color.
