What is it about?
The oxidation of superoxide by hydrogen peroxide to produce the hydroxyl radical, oxygen and water was invoked in the 1930s by Fritz Haber and Jo Weiss and shown to be extremely slow by Philip George in the late 1940s. This finding was confirmed in the 1970s. Thus this reaction cannot be invoked as a source as singlet oxygen. The authors of the criticised paper should have carried out a literature review.
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Why is it important?
One should not bring up a reaction that is kinetically and thermodynamically implausible. We wrote this in 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.freeradbiomed.2019.09.017), and before in 2001 ( https://doi: 10.1179/135100001101536373).
Perspectives
Hopefully, we will never hear again about the Haber-Weiss reaction.
Professor Willem H. Koppenol
Swiss Federal Insitute of Technology (ETH)
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A resurrection of the Haber–Weiss reaction, Nature Communications, January 2022, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-27823-2.
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