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There is a molecule called ‘haem’ that you might know as the thing that carries oxygen around your body in your blood. In red blood cells it’s attached to the protein called ‘haemoglobin’. However, it is also found in many other proteins all over the body. When it is attached to proteins it’s fine but when it starts floating around by itself it can cause a lot of damage to our cells.

Small amounts come unstuck from proteins all the time but luckily we have an enzyme called ‘heme-oxygenase’ that breaks down free haem so it can’t do any more damage. However, when we have problems with this enzyme and it stops working properly, like in Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes or cancer then our organs can become damaged by the free haem.

When our skin is hit by ultraviolet light (UV) we think that it damages our proteins and causes their haem to be released in much greater amounts than normally happens. We think that the haem oxygenase enzyme that breaks haem down cannot do it fast enough to stop all the damage.

I’m looking develop a way to measure how much haem is released. I’m trying to make a ‘molecular probe’ that will bind to haem in a cell and change colour. Then I can measure how much the colour changes under a microscope and work out how much haem there is.  This will also help me find out exactly how haem oxygenase works and how it’s regulated. Then we can start to further explore it’s role in different diseases.