porphyrin
Noun
Meaning
any of various pigments distributed widely in living tissues
Source: WordNetSynonyms
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Examples
At the same time, the imidazole side-chain of the histidine residue interacting at the other pole of the iron is pulled toward the porphyrin ring.
Iron's shift to a higher oxidation state in Hb-O 2 decreases the atom's size, and allows it into the plane of the porphyrin ring, pulling on the coordinated histidine residue and initiating the allosteric changes seen in the globulins.
Heme is a good example: the iron atom is at the centre of a porphyrin macrocycle, being bound to four nitrogen atoms of the tetrapyrrole macrocycle.
It is thus too large to fit inside the porphyrin ring, which bends instead into a dome with the Fe 2+ ion about 55 picometers above it.
Since many of these proteins contain globins and the heme moiety (iron in a flat porphyrin support), they are often called hemoglobins, even if their overall tertiary structure is very different from that of vertebrate hemoglobin.
This results in the Fe 2+ ion switching to a low-spin configuration, resulting in a 20% decrease in ionic radius so that now it can fit into the porphyrin ring, which becomes planar.