In: Chemistry
What is a buffering region?
What is the Bohr Effect?
(a) We know what buffer is. An aqueous solution consisting of a mixture of a weak acid and its conjugate base or vice versa. The pH of the solution shows very little change when a strong acid or base is added to the solution. Our blood is a great example of buffer. Now comes the buffering region. The buffering region is basically 1 pH unit on the either side of the pKa of the conjugate acid.
i.e pH = pKa + 1 or pKa - 1
The graphical representation is provided below for better understanding. The pH changes relatively slowly in the buffering region.
(b) Bohr's effect :
Sir Bohr gave the idea of the oxygen dissociation curve's shift in the Bohr's effect. The effect denotes the shift of the oxygen dissociation curve to the right in both adult and fetus in response to an increase in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide (which ultimately increases the acidity in the blood and hence decreases the pH ). This results in decrease in the oxygen affinity to bind with hemoglobin due to more of carbonic acid. In oxygen dissociation graph, the X axis represents the partial pressure of oxygen and Y axis represents the oxy-hemoglobin concentration. So we can observe from the graph that for the same partial pressure of oxygen ,the right shifted curve shows less oxy-hemoglobin concentration.