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Organic matter, organic material, or natural organic matter refers to the large source of carbon-based compounds found within natural and engineered, terrestrial, and aquatic environments. It is matter composed of organic compounds that have come from the feces and remains of organisms such as plants and animals . [ 1 ]
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]
Vitalism was a widespread conception that substances found in organic nature are formed from the chemical elements by the action of a "vital force" [6] or "life-force" (vis vitalis) that only living organisms possess. [7] In the 1810s, Jöns Jacob Berzelius argued that a regulative force must exist within living bodies.
Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass, after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Carbon's widespread abundance, its ability to form stable bonds with numerous other elements, and its unusual ability to form polymers at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth ...
Synthetic organic chemistry is an applied science as it borders engineering, the "design, analysis, and/or construction of works for practical purposes". [28] Organic synthesis of a novel compound is a problem-solving task, where a synthesis is designed for a target molecule by selecting optimal reactions from optimal starting materials.
A similar claim can be made for hydrogen because most organic compounds contain hydrogen chemically bonded to carbon or another common element like oxygen or nitrogen. The simplest form of an organic molecule is the hydrocarbon—a large family of organic molecules that are composed of hydrogen atoms bonded to a chain of carbon atoms.
The number of organic compounds is immense and the known number of defined compounds is close to 10 million. [4] However, an indefinitely large number of such compounds is theoretically possible. By definition, an organic compound must contain at least one atom of carbon, but this criterion is not generally regarded as sufficient.
Oxygen is the most abundant element in Earth's crust, and the third-most abundant element in the universe after hydrogen and helium. At standard temperature and pressure , two oxygen atoms will bind covalently to form dioxygen , a colorless and odorless diatomic gas with the chemical formula O