Pourbaix Stability Field Mapping of Ferrihydrite-Catalyzed PLOOH Production

Ferroptosis is a form of cell death that has become a hot topic in cancer and neuroscience research — it happens when iron inside a cell goes haywire and triggers a chain reaction that destroys fatty membranes, essentially causing the cell to self-destruct through oxidative damage. Meanwhile, serpentinization is a completely different field: it's the geology of what happens when seawater meets certain deep-sea and subsurface rocks, producing chemical reactions that cycle iron between different oxidation states over millions of years. These two worlds rarely talk to each other, but this hypothesis proposes they share a common map. The connecting tool is called a Pourbaix diagram — think of it as a kind of weather map for chemistry, but instead of showing temperature and pressure, it shows which form of iron is stable at any given combination of acidity (pH) and electrical potential (Eh). Geochemists use these constantly to predict what iron does in rocks and oceans. The hypothesis says: if you systematically test fatty membrane damage across a grid of different pH and electrical conditions, the damage pattern will line up almost perfectly with the region of the Pourbaix map where iron exists in its most reactive, dissolved form — Fe²⁺. In other words, a diagram designed to understand ancient rock chemistry might actually predict, with surprising precision, where and when iron kills cells. There's a neat twist built into this idea: ferrihydrite, a common iron mineral, stays stubbornly insoluble at neutral pH — meaning it's relatively harmless sitting in your bloodstream. But in the acidic environment of lysosomes (the cell's internal recycling bins), the chemistry shifts into exactly the danger zone on the Pourbaix map. This could explain why the cell's own cleanup process — breaking down iron-storage proteins in lysosomes — is what actually unleashes the iron that causes ferroptosis. Geology, it turns out, may have quietly been describing cell biology all along.

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