Signal of Your Oxygen Level

March 2, 2026

I t only takes a few seconds of holding your breath to know that not obtaining adequate oxygen is detrimental to your health. Is it possible, however, to have too much? Indeed, breathing air that contains more oxygen than your body requires can lead to health problems or even death. But with scant research on the topic, scientists have known little about how the body senses too much oxygen.

Now, a new study from Gladstone Institutes has greatly expanded the scientific body of knowledge about the mechanisms at play, and why it matters for health. Their findings, reported in the journal Science Advances, explain how breathing air with different levels of oxygen–from too little, to just right, or too much–affects the creation and degradation of different proteins in the lungs, heart, and brain of mice.

Notably, the study also highlights a particular protein that may play a central role in regulating how cells respond to hyperoxia. “These results have implications for many different diseases,” says Gladstone Assistant Investigator Isha Jain, PhD, senior author of the new study. “More than 1 million people in the US breathe supplemental oxygen every day for medical reasons, and studies suggest it could be making things worse in some cases.

That’s just one setting where our work is starting to explain what’s happening and how the body responds.” Understanding Oxygen’s Effects Most prior research on oxygen levels has examined the molecular effects of too little oxygen. And even in that realm, most of the focus has been on how low oxygen affects which genes are turned on or off.

“Our study enters uncharted territory by using mice and looking downstream of gene expression at which proteins abnormally accumulate or degrade in response to different oxygen concentrations,” says Kirsten Xuewen Chen, first author of the new paper and a graduate student at UC San Francisco.

The research builds on the team’s prior work, which revealed that in response to too much oxygen, certain proteins containing iron and sulfur clusters become degraded, leading cells to malfunction.