Hemoglobin is a tetrameric protein which is able to dissociate into dimers. The dimers can in turn dissociate into tetramers. It has been found that dimers are more reactive than tetramers. The difference in the reactivity of these two species has been used to determine the tetramerdimer dissociation constant of various derivatives of rabbit hemoglobin. The constant has been found to be the same for all the derivatives of rabbit hemoglobin, implying that the ligand bound on the heme has no significant effect on the tetramer-dimer dissociation of rabbit hemoglobin.

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