Abstract #1982

Lin P, Jue T, Kreutzer U

Even the role as oxygen storage has been well established, another character of myoglobin, facilated oxygen diffusion, still lacks a reliable value for the intracellular diffusivity of myoglobin to determine if it is physiological significance. A modified pulsed-gradient stimulated echo (PG-STE) sequence was used to measure the signal attenuation of oxymyoglobin in a perfused rat heart during K+ arrest. Our current experimental results represent the diffusion coefficient of myoglobin in the cell is just slightly slower than in solution, which indicates the in vivo myoglobin-facilated oxygen diffusion cannot be ignored.