Imagine that you are a detective in Victorian times. Your investigation is going well, but you need to find one final piece of evidence — the victim’s bloodstain on the suspect’s clothes. Thanks to German chemist Christian Schönbein, you can save yourself hours of work looking for blood drops under a microscope. Instead, you can pour hydrogen peroxide solution onto the textile. If there is even a tiny trace of blood, you will notice foam, coming from a reaction caused by catalase.
Catalase is an enzyme that is naturally present in blood. It is responsible for protecting our cells from hydrogen peroxide, which is a by-product of certain metabolic processes. The enzyme contains a haem group with iron at the centre (see CHEMISTRY REVIEW, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 16–22). Catalase triggers and accelerates the decomposition reaction of hydrogen peroxide to oxygen and water (see CHEMISTRY REVIEW, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 24–26).
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