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 °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.
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Bada, J.L., Miller, S.L. & Zhao, M. The stability of amino acids at submarine hydrothermal vent temperatures. Origins Life Evol Biosphere 25, 111–118 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01581577
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01581577