Narrow Results

The reactivity of Cu-based oxygen carrier prepared by mechanical mixing for producing oxygen was investigated in a thermogravimetric analyzer. The results show that the oxygen carrier has excellent stability during reduction–oxidation cycles. This oxygen carrier showed a maximum oxygen transport capacity of 0.059 g/g during cycle experiments and the time for one cycle is less than 16 min. Phases and surface morphology of oxygen carriers were measured by X-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscope before and after experiments. The phases of reduced oxygen carrier are only Cu₂O and TiO₂ and of fresh or oxidized samples are only CuO and TiO₂. These reveal that the oxygen carrier is stable using the preparation process and under the operation conditions. SEM images show that the fresh and reacted oxygen carrier particles did not appear to disintegrate after 23 cycles.

We report a novel method to simultaneously extract superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT) and carbonic anhydrase (CA) from the same sample of red blood cells (RBCs). This avoids the need to use expensive commercial enzymes, thus allowing this to be cost effective for large-scale production of a nanobiotechnological polyHb-SOD-CAT-CA with enhancements to all three RBC functions. The best concentration of phosphate buffer for ethanol-chloroform treatment results in good recovery of CAT, SOD and CA after extraction. Different concentrations of the enzymes can be used to enhance the activity of polyHb-SOD-CAT-CA to 2, 4 or 6 times that of RBCs.