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The stability of amino acids at submarine hydrothermal vent temperatures
1Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla 92093, USA.
Abstract:
It has been postulated that amino acid stability at hydrothermal vent temperatures is controlled by a metastable thermodynamic equilibrium rather than by kinetics. Experiments reported here demonstrate that the amino acids are irreversibly destroyed by heating at 240 degrees C and that quasi-equilibrium calculations give misleading descriptions of the experimental observations. Equilibrium thermodynamic calculations are not applicable to organic compounds under high-temperature submarine vent conditions.