Mass spectrometric analysis of selected radiolyzed amino acids in an astrochemical context

Cherubini, Cristina; Ursini, Ornella; Cataldo, Franco; Iglesias‐Groth, Susana; Crestoni, Maria Elisa

doi:10.1007/s10967-014-3078-1

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 30 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Draganic et al have estimated that a cometary nucleus of 10 km radius would contain radionuclides that would emit ~14 MGy of radiation over 4.5 billion years (the age of the Solar System); the majority of this radiation (11 MGy) occurring in the first tens of millions of years due to 26 Al decay (Draganic et al, 1984). Many other studies investigating the radiolysis of organic compounds have adopted this dose of 14 MGy for asteroids and comets in general (Cataldo et al, 2011b;Cataldo et al, 2011a;Cherubini et al, 2014;Iglesias-Groth et al, 2011). Our total dose of ~1 MGy approximates hundreds of million years' worth of γ-radiation emitted in meteorite parent bodies due to slow radionuclide decay.…”

Section: Comparison Of Results With Estimated Cosmic Radiation Dosesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…who used soft X-rays at 150 eV to irradiate solid-state adenine and uracil and concluded that only small reductions were measured by in situ Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (Pilling et al ., 2011). Past studies have also shown that nucleobases are much more resistant to ionizing radiation than amino acids, another class of organic compounds necessary for life as we know it (Pilling et al ., 2011; Cataldo et al ., 2011 a , 2011 b ; Iglesias-Groth et al ., 2011; Cherubini et al ., 2014).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Radiolysis of solid-state nitrogen heterocycles provides clues to their abundance in the early solar system

Hammer

Yoda

et al. 2018

International Journal of Astrobiology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We studied the radiolysis of a wide variety of N-heterocycles, including many of biological importance, and find that the majority are remarkably stable in the solid-state when subjected to large doses of ionizing gamma radiation from a 60Co source. Degradation of N-heterocycles as a function of dose rate and total dose was measured using high-performance liquid chromatography with UV detection. Many N-heterocycles show little degradation when γ-irradiated up to a total dose of ~1 MGy, which approximates hundreds of millions of years’ worth of radiation emitted in meteorite parent bodies due to slow radionuclide decay. Extrapolation of these results suggests that these N-heterocyclic compounds would be stable in dry parent bodies over solar system timescales. We suggest that the abundance of these N-heterocycles as measured presently in carbonaceous meteorites is largely reflective of their abundance at the time aqueous alteration stopped in their parent bodies and the absence of certain compounds in present-day samples is either due to the formation mechanisms or degradation which occurred during periods of aqueous alteration or thermal metamorphism.

show abstract