A team of researchers from Wake Forest University, the National Institutes of Health and other institutions has discovered a previously undetected chemical process within the oxygen-carrying molecule haemoglobin that could have far-reaching implications for the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. In a paper published online 4 Nov. in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, senior authors Daniel Kim-Shapiro, professor of physics at Wake Forest, and Mark Gladwin, chief of the Vascular Medicine Branch of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the NIH, describe how haemoglobin, through a catalytic reaction that does not change its own chemical properties, converts nitrite salt...