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The nitrogen compounds through which excess nitrogen is eliminated from organisms are called nitrogenous wastes (/ n aɪ ˈ t r ɒ dʒ ɪ n ə s /) or nitrogen wastes. They are ammonia, urea, uric acid, and creatinine. All of these substances are produced from protein metabolism.
Graphic representation of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur. CHNOPS and CHON are mnemonic acronyms for the most common elements in living organisms. . "CHON" stands for carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which together make up more than 95 percent of the mass of biological system
However, the matter that makes up living organisms is conserved and recycled. The six most common elements associated with organic molecules—carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur—take a variety of chemical forms and may exist for long periods in the atmosphere, on land, in water, or beneath the Earth's surface.
The term natural cycling appears in a 1968 paper on the transportation of leaf litter and its chemical elements for consideration in fisheries management: "Fluvial transport of tree litter from drainage basins is a factor in natural cycling of chemical elements and in the degradation of the land." [48]: 131
The six aforementioned elements are used by organisms in a variety of ways. Hydrogen and oxygen are found in water and organic molecules, both of which are essential to life. Carbon is found in all organic molecules, whereas nitrogen is an important component of nucleic acids and proteins.
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]
Just six elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium and phosphorus—make up almost 99% of the mass of living cells, including those in the human body (see composition of the human body for a complete list). In addition to the six major elements that compose most of the human body, humans require smaller amounts of possibly 18 more ...
Carbon is a primary component of all known life on Earth, and represents approximately 45–50% of all dry biomass. [1] Carbon compounds occur naturally in great abundance on Earth. Complex biological molecules consist of carbon atoms bonded with other elements , especially oxygen and hydrogen and frequently also nitrogen , phosphorus , and ...