Abstract
PORPHYRINS, which are present in most sediments and crude oils, represent the 'molecular fossils' of compounds such as chlorophylls, bacteriochlorophylls and haems in the organisms from which the organic material is derived1–4. They have the potential to provide information about palaeoenvironmental conditions at the time of deposition5–9. Porphyrins derived from degradation of chlorophylls are of particular interest because of the possibility of relating palaeoproductivity estimates from sediments to chlorophyll-based measurements of present-day productivity determined by remote sensing. But standard analytical methods do not detect all of the porphyrins present in a geological sample — a substantial fraction of the porphyrins may be bound to kerogen10,11 or to solvent-extractable macromolecules, or may be degraded by the oxidative extraction procedures. It has been shown recently12–16 that sulphur may play a crucial part in binding 'biomarker' molecules at an early stage of sediment diagenesis, and that desulphurization using Raney nickel may liberate small molecules bound to sulphur-containing species. Here we show that this approach releases large amounts of porphyrins from the total organic extract of a sulphur-rich marl. Liberating bound porphyrins in this way may greatly enhance the amount of information on palaeoenvironments that can be extracted from geochemical analysis of sediments.
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Schaeffer, P., Ocampo, R., Callot, H. et al. Extraction of bound porphyrins from sulphur-rich sediments and their use for reconstruction of palaeoenvironments. Nature 364, 133–136 (1993). https://doi.org/10.1038/364133a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/364133a0
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