Chlorine As An Alternative To Oxygen
A number of alternatives to molecular oxygen as a terminal electron acceptor are known from anaerobic life forms on Earth. However, it has been proposed that chlorine might serve as a more general biological alternative to oxygen, either in carbon-based biologies or hypothetical non-carbon-based ones. But chlorine is much less abundant than oxygen in the universe, and so planets with a sufficiently chlorine-rich atmosphere are likely to be rare, if they exist at all. Chlorine will instead likely be bound up as salts and other inert compounds.
Read more about this topic: Hypothetical Types Of Biochemistry
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