Hematin anhydride (β-hematin): An analogue to malaria pigment hemozoin possesses nonlinearity

Hematin anhydride (β-hematin), the synthetic analogue of the malaria pigment, "hemozoin", is a heme dimer produced by reciprocal covalent bonds among carboxylic acid groups on the protoporphyrin-IX ring and the iron atom present in the two adjacent heme molecules. Hemozoin is a disposal product formed from the digestion of hemoglobin present in the red blood cells infected with hematophagous malaria parasites. Besides, as the parasites invade red blood cells, hemozoin crystals are eventually released into the bloodstream, where they accumulate over time in tissues. Severe malaria infection leads to significant dysfunction in vital organs such as the liver, spleen, and brain in part due to the autoimmune response to the excessive accumulation of hemozoin in these tissues. Also, the amount of these crystals in the vasculature correlates with disease progression. Thus, hemozoin is a unique indicator of infection used as a malaria biomarker and hence, used as a target for the development of antimalarial drugs. Hence, exploring various properties of hemozoin is extremely useful in the direction of diagnosis and cure. The present study focuses on finding one of the unknown properties of β-hematin in physiological conditions by using the Z-scan technique, which is simple, sensitive, and economical. It is observed that hemozoin possesses one of the unique material properties, i.e., nonlinearity with a detection limit of ∼ 15 µM. The self-defocusing action causes β-hematin to exhibit negative refractive nonlinearity. The observed data is analyzed with a thermal lensing model. We strongly believe that our simple and reliable approach to probing the nonlinearity of β-hematin will provide fresh opportunities for malaria diagnostics & cure in the near future.