Orion Farr (MIT) "Blood from Stone: Electron-Shuttling Green Rust as the Bridge Between Geochemical and Biochemical Metabolism"

Life’s first breaths may have begun not inside cells, but on minerals. My research focuses on Green Rust, a metastable Fe2+/3+-oxyhydroxide, and how its variable charge, exchangeable interlayer species, and semiconducting behavior reveal mechanistic and structural links between geochemical and biochemical pathways. Using electrochemical measurements, spectroscopy, and NMR, I investigate how electrons and protons move cooperatively through green rust's lattice to drive the redox transformations of CO₂, CO, and CH₄ yielding pathways that mirror life’s earliest metabolisms while offering low-cost mechanisms for carbon sequestration. These findings position green rust as a plausible inorganic proto-enzyme, whose reactivity in the early ferruginous oceans may have shaped the early Earth’s environment and paved the way for life itself. Today, the same redox couple that once powered ancient green rust now flows through our blood and serves as a model for sustainable pathways of carbon transformation.