Unpublished manuscript on redox reactions of the pesticide phorate sulfoxide in anaerobic sediment slurries

Unpublished manuscript on redox reactions of the organophosphate pesticide phorate sulfoxide in anaerobic sediment slurries by Paul G. Tratnyek and N. Lee Wolfe.

This manuscript was submitted as a research paper to Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in 1988, but was rejected mainly over issues with the interpretation of Figure 5. We intended to repeat those experiments, expand the scope, and resubmit the study, but then moved onto other research topics. 

However, around that time, we included some of the results from this study in presentations on the role of abiotic reduction reactions in contaminant transformation under anoxic conditions. This contributed to Rene Schwarzenbach’s choice to include the thiol-sulfoxide redox couple in the table of “Redox reactions that may occur chemically in the environment” in his textbook on Environmental Organic Chemistry (e.g., Table 23.1 of the 3^rd edition). 

Recently, there has been renewed interest in the role of abiotic processes in contaminant reduction reactions, especially in the context of “abiotic natural attention” of chlorinated solvents in groundwater. And, we recently learned that some perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) include S-containing moieties that may be redox labile. That might give some new relevance to the results in this old manuscript.

The manuscript is provided here in the originally submitted form—after scanning to a PDF with OCR—without any updates to the content. Only the headers were added. The text and figures of this manuscript were never made available online in any form prior to this.