The human hemoglobin system provides a unique opportunity for detailed analysis into the question of correlating structural and thermodynamic information at the molecular level.

A series of thermodynamic and statistical-mechanical models are being formulated which include the effects of subunit dissociation and ligand binding. Results of analyses on real experimental data will provide important new insight into the general problem of correlating thermodynamic and structural information, the underlying mechanisms of cooperativity, and the phenomena of ligand-linked polymerization processes.