Before we're gonna we've talked now how CO2 and O2 and
protons are going to affect how our breathing, our breathing rate and
how deeply we breath and we haven't really addressed proton
transport in the blood, so we're gonna do that right now.
Where in the tissues we know that oxygen is going to
be released from hemoglobin so that now we're gonna have deoxyhemoglobin and
deoxyhemoglobin has a greater affinity for CO2 as well as protons.
So, just like CO2, protons can bind hemoglobin and so
that hemoglobin will bind protons and this is convenient because this is happening in
the tissues where you're dumping oxygen and now we want to pickup CO2.
And we've got extra protons from metabolism, and so
those will be picked up by the hemoglobin.
So this is a major buffer in the blood, is hemoglobin.
And normally, we do have a shift in pH of the blood where our
arterial blood is gonna be 7.4 and venous blood 7.36.
If we didn't have hemoglobin, that difference would be much bigger.
The venous blood would have a much lower pH, so it's a major effect.
It doesn't completely erase the change in PH, but it makes the difference much less.