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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 August 2017
We discuss the parameters needed to model chemistry in extragalactic clouds. While density and temperature can be constrained by multiline observations, molecular abundances may be severely affected by the adopted elemental abundances. While the observations of the Magelllanic Clouds can be reasonably interpreted in terms of dark cloud models, molecular gas in starburst galaxies could well be dominated by photoeffects. The detection of deuterium in extragalactic molecules would provide a valuable diagnostic.