Abiotic Racemization Kinetics of Amino Acids in Marine Sediments

The ratios of d- versus l-amino acids can be used to infer the sources and composition of sedimentary organic matter. Such inferences, however, rely on knowing the rates at which amino acids in sedimentary organic matter racemize abiotically between the d- and the l-forms. Based on a heating experiment, we report kinetic parameters for racemization of aspartic acid, glutamic acid, serine, and alanine in bulk sediment from Aarhus Bay, Denmark, taken from the surface, 30 cm, and 340 cm depth below seafloor. Extrapolation to a typical cold deep sea sediment temperature of 3°C suggests racemization rate constants of 0.50×10−5–11×10−5 yr−1. These results can be used in conjunction with measurements of sediment age to predict the ratio of d:l amino acids due solely to abiotic racemization of the source material, deviations from which can indicate the abundance and turnover of active microbial populations.

• Publication year

  2013

• Venue

  PLoS ONE

• Publication date

  2013-08-12

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Chemistry, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0071648PMID 23951211PMCID 3741123
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

• Case Study — Aarhus Bay

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