text: The practice of designating hemes with upper case letters was formalized in a footnote in a paper by Puustinen and Wikstrom, which explains under which conditions a capital letter should be used: "we prefer the use of capital letters to describe the heme structure as isolated. Lowercase letters may then be freely used for cytochromes and enzymes, as well as to describe individual protein-bound heme groups (for example, cytochrome bc, and aa3 complexes, cytochrome b, heme c of the bc complex, heme a of the aa complex, etc)." In other words, the chemical compound would be designated with a capital letter, but specific instances in structures with lowercase. Thus cytochrome oxidase, which has two A hemes (heme a and heme a) in its structure, contains two moles of heme A per mole protein. Cytochrome bc, with hemes b, b, and c, contains heme B and heme C in a 2:1 ratio. The practice seems to have originated in a paper by Caughey and York in which the product of a new isolation procedure for the heme of cytochrome aa3 was designated heme A to differentiate it from previous preparations: "Our product is not identical in all respects with the heme a obtained in solution by other workers by the reduction of the hemin a as isolated previously (2). For this reason, we shall designate our product heme A until the apparent differences can be rationalized." In a later paper, Caughey's group uses capital letters for isolated heme B and C as well as A.