Hydroxylamine - Uses

Uses

Hydroxylamine and its salts are commonly used as reducing agents in myriad organic and inorganic reactions. They can also act as antioxidants for fatty acids. Some non-chemical uses include removal of hair from animal hides and photography developing solutions.

The nitrate salt, hydroxylammonium nitrate, is being researched as a rocket propellant, both in water solution as a monopropellant and in its solid form as a solid propellant.

This has also been used in the past by biologists to introduce random mutations by switching base pairs from G to A, or from C to T. This is to probe functional areas of genes to elucidate what happens if their functions are broken. Nowadays other mutagens are used. Hydroxylamine can also be used to highly selectively cleave asparaginyl-glycine peptide bonds in peptides and proteins. It also bonds to and permanently disables (poisons) heme-containing enzymes. It is used as an irreversible inhibitor of the oxygen-evolving complex of photosynthesis on account of its similar structure to water.

In the semiconductor industry, hydroxylamine is often a component in the "resist stripper" which removes photoresist after lithography.