The hemoglobins of the cyanobacteria Synechococcus and Synechocystis (GlbNs) are capable of spontaneous and
irreversible attachment of the b heme to the protein matrix. The reaction, which saturates the heme 2-vinyl by
addition of a histidine residue, is reproduced in vitro by preparing the recombinant apoprotein, adding ferric
heme, and reducing the iron to the ferrous state. Spontaneous covalent attachment of the heme is potentially
useful for protein engineering purposes. Thus, to explore whether the histidine–heme linkage can serve in
such applications, we attempted to introduce it in a test protein.We selected as our target the heme domain of
Chlamydomonas eugametos LI637 (CtrHb), a eukaryotic globin that exhibits less than 50% sequence identity
with the cyanobacterial GlbNs. We chose two positions, 75 in the FG corner and 111 in the H helix, to situate a
histidine near a vinyl group. We characterized the proteins with gel electrophoresis, absorbance spectroscopy,
andNMR analysis. Both T111H and L75H CtrHbs reacted upon reduction of the ferric starting material containing
cyanide as the distal ligand to the iron.With L75H CtrHb, nearly complete (N90%) crosslinking was observed to
the 4-vinyl as expected fromthe X-ray structure of wild-type CtrHb. Reaction of T111H CtrHb also occurred at the
4-vinyl, in a 60% yield indicating a preference for the flipped heme orientation in the starting material. The work
suggests that the His–heme modification will be applicable to the design of proteins with a non-dissociable
heme group.