Two CO-isotope sensitive lines have been detected in the overtone region of the resonance Raman spectra of CO-bound hemeproteins. One line is assigned as the overtone of the Fe-CO stretching mode and is located in the 1000-to 1070-cm'1 region. The other line is found in the 1180-to 1210-cmn-' region and is assigned as a combination between a porphyrin mode, V7, and the F6-CO stretching mode. The high intensities of these lines, which in the terminal oxidase class of proteins are of the same order as those of the fundamental stretching mode, indicate that the mechanism of enhancement for modes involving the Fe-CO moiety is different from that for the modes of the porphyrin macrocycle and call for reexamination of Raman theory of porphyrins as applied to axial ligands. The anharmonicity of the electronic potential function was evaluated, revealing that in the terminal oxidases the anharmonicity is greater than in the other heme proteins that were examined, suggesting a distinctive interaction of the bound CO with its distal environment in this family. Furthermore, the anharmonicity correlates with the frequency of the C-0 stretching mode, demonstrating that both of these parameters are sensitive to the Fe-CO bond energy. The overtone and combination lines involving the bound CO promise to be additional probes of heme protein structural properties.Heme proteins, which function either as oxygen carriers or as catalytic enzymes, have a pocket on the distal side of the heme in which exogenous ligands bind to the iron atom. The function of the heme protein depends critically on the properties of the distal pocket and how its residues interact with the hemebound exogenous ligands. Studies of CO adducts of heme proteins have been shown to be extremely important probes of the active sites, including the interactions between the CO and the distal residues (1, 2). In addition, CO photodissociation and recombination studies have played an essential role in unraveling the dynamic processes that occur in heme proteins, information which has led to an advanced understanding of the basic physics that forms the foundation of the physiological process of ligand binding (3, 4).Structural information such as the identity of the proximal ligand, the geometry of the bound CO, and the interactions between the axial ligands and the heme environment has been determined from the vibrational spectra of the fundamental modes involving the CO. However, overtones offer the possibility of yielding additional information concerning the heme pocket and the electronic structure because the behavior of the overtones depends critically on the shape of the ground-state potential function as well as the properties of the excited electronic state. In the overtone region of the Fe-CO stretching mode ("Feco) two lines have been independently discovered recently (5, 6). We assign one as the overtone ("over) Of the Fe-CO stretching mode and the second as a combination (Vcomb) of the Fe-CO stretching mode with a mode of the porphyrin macrocycle (V7...