“…A method affording measurement of structural changes of Mb*CO with respect to Mb and MbCO was required, and in 1979 the first data were obtained at 4 K by the extended X-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) method, which determines alterations in the distances of the first, second, and third shell ligands of iron porphyrins (Chance & Powers, 1981a,b;Fischetti et al, 1981), as first used in the study of hemoglobin (Eisenberger et al, 1978) and more recently of cytochrome oxidase (Powers et al, 1981(Powers et al, , 1982Chance & Powers, 1981a;Chance et al, 1980a). The findings have been consistent since the early observation, indicating small structural changes on photolysis and pointing, for the first time, to the possibility that the ligand remains close to the iron atom and that the Fe-Np(pyrrole) distances lengthen characteristic of the change from MbCO to Mb is incomplete.…”