Preparation of Crystalline Oxymyoglobin from Horse Heart.

Recently great advances have been made in the preparation of pure myoglobin by the introduction of ion exchange cellulose column chromatography (1, 2). Myoglobin, however, shows a strong tendency to be oxidized to metmyoglobin during isolation procedures. For this reason all myoglobin preparations reported earlier were obtained in the form of metmyoglobin. Therefore, oxymyoglobin has usually been obtained from metmyoglobin by reduction with sodium hydrosulfite, a procedure which has remained questionable especially from the point of view of its physiological activity. This communication deals with procedures for the isolation of native oxymyoglobin from fresh horse heart, and the chromatographic separation of oxymyoglobin from metmyoglobin with diethylaminoethyl cellulose.