Supercritical nitrogen as biosolvent?

Supercritical CO2 has been suggested as a potential alternative bio-solvent, replacing water, at high pressures and modestly elevated temperatures.

But what about supercritical N2? ScCO2 is an industrially-useful solvent for organic chemistry, so a good bit of research has been done relevant to its suitability as a biosolvent, but finding relevant info on nitrogen is seems to be significantly more difficult. Apparently, it is useful as a solvent for some drying and cleaning processes--which is what sparked my curiosity--but there seems to be a dearth of information on precisely how it behaves with various complex organic molecules (like, e.g., proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and so forth).

Nitrogen's critical point occurs at significantly lower pressure than CO2, and cryogenic temperatures, and so would open up a quite different range of interesting alien homeworlds to play with.

posted almost 7 years ago

Logan R. Kearsley‭

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