Sickle cell hemoglobin, however, after giving up oxygen, cling together and make the red blood cell stiff.

Now, she said, "someone has to look at sickle cell hemoglobin to see if what they found at Duke with normal hemoglobin applies."

Itano also found that the globin portion of sickle cell hemoglobin had a barely detectable difference in electrical charge.

His dissertation title was "Physical-Chemistry studies of Sickle Cell Hemoglobin."

He found that, under certain conditions, sickle cell hemoglobin is positively charged while normal hemoglobin is not, creating a difference in electrophoretic mobility.

Chakrabarti also is working on fiber formation in sickle cell hemoglobin, the mutant form of hemoglobin responsible for sickle cell anemia.

Pauling was convinced that sickle cell disease was caused by defective hemoglobin, and set Itano to find out what made sickle cell hemoglobin chemically different.

Sickle cell disease has several recognized forms including sickle cell anemia, sickle cell hemoglobin C disease and sickle cell thalassemia disease.

In this variant one parent has the sickle cell hemoglobin the second parent has Hb Lepore Boston, the only one of the three variants described in association with HbS.

One recurring theme in malaria vaccine research has been the high frequency of the gene for sickle cell hemoglobin (HbS) in malaria endemic regions, which is believed to be due to a heterozygote (HbAS) advantage against fatal malaria.

Beginning in 1957, Vernon Ingram and others showed through protein fingerprinting that genetic variations in proteins (such as sickle cell hemoglobin) could be limited to differences in just a single polypeptide chain in a multimeric protein, leading to a "one gene-one polypeptide" hypothesis instead.