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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.
See also: Carbon-based life: Fossil fuels: coal, methane and petroleum Textile industry: cellulose Metallurgy: alloys, especially carbon steel 7: N: Nitrogen 2: 15: Bacteria and archaea: nitrogen fixation by diazotrophs All forms of life on Earth: essential component of amino acids and of nucleic acids Earth's atmosphere, soil, and life forms ...
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.
Chemistry is the scientific study of the properties and behavior of matter. [1] It is a physical science within the natural sciences that studies the chemical elements that make up matter and compounds made of atoms, molecules and ions: their composition, structure, properties, behavior and the changes they undergo during reactions with other substances.
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.
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
A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z). [ 1 ] The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements , whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding ...
The name zirconium is derived from the name of the mineral zircon, the most important source of zirconium. The word is related to Persian zargun (zircon; zar-gun , "gold-like" or "as gold"). [ 11 ] Besides zircon, zirconium occurs in over 140 other minerals, including baddeleyite and eudialyte ; most zirconium is produced as a byproduct of ...