Globin proteins of the normal and anemic duck

The red blood cells of normal adult ducks contain two main hemoglobins. The most abundant type, HbA, comprises approximately 80% of the total, with the remaining 20% being made up of HbD. An attempt was made to determine whether during hemolytic anemia a special alpha globin chain (alpha s) replaces the alpha chain of HbA found in normal animals. This special stress alpha globin, whose existence has been seriously questioned, was originally postulated to explain the sequence discrepancies obtained between alpha chains of normal and anemic chickens and ducks. Using gel electrophoresis, isoelectric focusing, and HPLC peptide mapping techniques no qualitative differences between the alpha A globins of normal and anemic animals were found. The nature of the beta globin chains present in adult ducks has also never been rigorously established. In this work, a variety of techniques, including HPLC, gel electrophoresis, and microcolumn amino acid analysis, were used to examine the beta chains from each hemoglobin. Using these methods, no differences were found between the beta globin chains of the two hemoglobins.