But other marine worms that it shares its habitat with are not so mellow. They produce loads of noxious halophenols, pesticide-like substances, to keep competitors like Amphitrite at bay. Lebioda and his colleagues of the University of South Carolina in Columbia discovered that Amphitrite is not helpless against this onslaught. From its structure, they deduced that in DHP, the same atom that in hemoglobin latches onto oxygen instead grabs a molecule of hydrogen peroxide, which is always floating about in animals, and pinches off a single oxygen atom. It sticks the electron-hungry oxygen on passing halophenols to disable them.
Biochemists are excited about the new versatility of globins.