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Parts-per-million cube of relative abundance by mass of elements in an average adult human body down to 1 ppm. 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 ...
Selenium, which is an essential element for animals and prokaryotes and is a beneficial element for many plants, is the least-common of all the elements essential to life. [ 3 ] [ 63 ] Selenium acts as the catalytic center of several antioxidant enzymes, such as glutathione peroxidase , [ 11 ] and plays a wide variety of other biological roles .
Element percentages in the human body. Biometals (also called biocompatible metals, bioactive metals, metallic biomaterials) are metals normally present, in small but important and measurable amounts, in biology, biochemistry, and medicine.
Twenty chemical elements are known to be required to support human biochemical processes by serving structural and functional roles, and there is evidence for a few more. [1] [9] Oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen are the most abundant elements in the body by weight and make up about 96% of the weight of a human body.
The human body has complex homeostatic mechanisms which attempt to ensure a constant supply of available copper, while eliminating excess copper whenever this occurs. However, like all essential elements and nutrients, too much or too little nutritional ingestion of copper can result in a corresponding condition of copper excess or deficiency ...
Iron is an important biological element. [1] [2] [3] It is used in both the ubiquitous iron-sulfur proteins [1] and in vertebrates it is used in hemoglobin which is essential for blood and oxygen transport. [4]
Manganese is an essential human dietary element. It is present as a coenzyme in several biological processes, which include macronutrient metabolism, bone formation, and free radical defense systems. It is a critical component in dozens of proteins and enzymes. [3] The human body contains about 12 mg of manganese, mostly in the bones.
Iodine is an essential trace element in biological systems. It has the distinction of being the heaviest element commonly needed by living organisms as well as the second-heaviest known to be used by any form of life (only tungsten, a component of a few bacterial enzymes, has a higher atomic number and atomic weight). It is a component of ...