The extracellular hemoglobin of the earthworm Lumbricus terrestris has four major kinds of O 2 -binding chains: a, b, and c (forming a disulfide-linked trimer), and chain d. Non-heme, non-globin structural chains, "linkers," are also present. Light-scattering techniques have been used to show that the ferrous CO-saturated abc trimer and chain d form an (abcd) 4 complex of 285 kDa at neutral pH. Formation of the full-sized 4-MDa molecule requires the addition of linker chains in the proportion of two linkers per (abcd) 4 and occurs much more rapidly in the presence of 10 mM calcium. This stoichiometry is supported not only by direct quantitative analysis of the intact hemoglobin but also by the fact that the addition of 50% of the proposed stoichiometric quantity of linkers results in the conversion of 50% of the (abcd) 4 to full-sized molecules. Isolated COsaturated abc trimers self-associate to (abc) 2 and higher aggregates up to an apparent limit of (abc) 10 ϳ550 kDa. The extracellular hemoglobins of annelids were first shown by Svedberg and Eriksson (1) to be gigantic molecules of at least 3 MDa in molecular mass. Although several subsequent studies gave molecular masses close to 4 MDa or higher for the Hb of Lumbricus terrestris and related species (2-4), recent studies by scanning transmission electron microscopy (5) have suggested masses of 3.5-3.6 MDa, and early light-scattering measurements suggested even lower values (6, 7). A possible reason for this great variation in reported molecular masses is oxidation which has been shown to cause extensive dissociation of many annelid Hbs (8 -10). Goss et al. (9) used light scattering to show that oxidation of L. terrestris Hb at neutral pH caused a large drop in molecular weight. Similarly, Ascoli et al. (10) found that oxidation of the similar Hb from Octolasium complanatum 1 caused hemichrome formation and dissociation outside of a narrow range near pH 7.The stoichiometry has also been uncertain. The Hb of L. terrestris has four major kinds of O 2 -binding globin chains: a, b, and c (forming the disulfide-linked abc trimer) and chain d, together with non-heme structural chains, "linkers," designated L. Kapp et al. (11) and Vinogradov et al. (12) have reported that linkers comprise 33-36% of the total mass, but this conclusion was based largely on the staining of SDS-gels with Coomassie Blue. This dye, however, binds to different proteins to quite different extents (13,14). Ownby et al. (15) redetermined the stoichiometry by reverse-phase high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).2 The weight proportions of linkers were found to be approximately 16.4% by two independent procedures: the integrated absorption of the HPLC peaks and amino acid analysis of these peaks. These results led to the conclusion that the overall stoichiometry is (abcd) 2 L. This stoichiometry is further supported by the results of SDS-capillary gel electrophoresis monitored at 214 nm (see our companion study (16)).The goals of the present experiments are to redetermine the molecu...