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About 99% of the mass of the human body is made up of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. Only about 0.85% is composed of another five elements: potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, and magnesium. All 11 are necessary for life. The remaining elements are trace elements, of which more than a dozen are ...
Metabolism (/ m ə ˈ t æ b ə l ɪ z ə m /, from Greek: μεταβολή metabolē, "change") is the set of life-sustaining chemical reactions in organisms.The three main functions of metabolism are: the conversion of the energy in food to energy available to run cellular processes; the conversion of food to building blocks of proteins, lipids, nucleic acids, and some carbohydrates; and the ...
Most biomolecules are organic compounds, and just four elements — oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen —make up 96% of the human body 's mass. But many other elements, such as the various biometals, are also present in small amounts. The uniformity of both specific types of molecules (the biomolecules) and of certain metabolic pathways ...
Cellular respiration. Typical eukaryotic cell. Cellular respiration is the process by which biological fuels are oxidized in the presence of an inorganic electron acceptor, such as oxygen, to drive the bulk production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which contains energy. Cellular respiration may be described as a set of metabolic reactions ...
Biological roles of the elements. A large fraction of the chemical elements that occur naturally on the Earth's surface are essential to the structure and metabolism of living things. Four of these elements (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen) are essential to every living thing and collectively make up 99% of the mass of protoplasm. [ 1 ]
In the context of nutrition, a mineral is a chemical element. Some "minerals" are essential for life, but most are not. [ 1 ][ 2 ][ 3 ]Minerals are one of the four groups of essential nutrients; the others are vitamins, essential fatty acids, and essential amino acids. [ 4 ] The five major minerals in the human body are calcium, phosphorus ...
For acidosis referring to acidity of the urine, see Renal tubular acidosis. Acidosis is a biological process producing hydrogen ions and increasing their concentration in blood or body fluids. pH is the negative log of hydrogen ion concentration and so it is decreased by a process of acidosis.
Hydrogen is a chemical element; it has symbol H and atomic number 1. It is the lightest element and, at standard conditions, is a gas of diatomic molecules with the formula H2, sometimes called dihydrogen, [ 11 ] but more commonly called hydrogen gas, molecular hydrogen or simply hydrogen. It is colorless, odorless, [ 12 ] non-toxic, and highly ...