It is the 7th most abundantly found element of the entire solar system. We can also find it in the nucleic acids DNA and RNA of our very makeup and it is also essential in cell growth, energy production, and many other body processes. As if this all was not amazing enough, nitrogen influences our lives every day in the way it is used in various industries.
The chemical industry uses this gas in the production of fertilizers, nylon, nitric acid, dyes, medicines, and explosives. Here are the five applications of nitrogen in everyday life.
Nitrogen gases are used for generating an altered or man-made atmosphere condition where it is applied with carbon dioxide to help aid in the preservation of packaged or bulk foods. It helps with food preservation by safeguarding against oxidative damage which causes the decay and breakdown that causes food to spoil.
Both kinds of bacteria can act only in the presence of oxygen, O 2 [ 7 ]. The process of nitrification is important to plants, as it produces an extra stash of available nitrogen that can be absorbed by the plants through their root systems.
The fourth stage of the nitrogen cycle is immobilization, sometimes described as the reverse of mineralization. These two processes together control the amount of nitrogen in soils. Just like plants, microorganisms living in the soil require nitrogen as an energy source. These soil microorganisms pull nitrogen from the soil when the residues of decomposing plants do not contain enough nitrogen. Immobilization, therefore, ties up nitrogen in microorganisms.
However, immobilization is important because it helps control and balance the amount of nitrogen in the soils by tying it up, or immobilizing the nitrogen, in microorganisms. In the fifth stage of the nitrogen cycle, nitrogen returns to the air as nitrates are converted to atmospheric nitrogen N 2 by bacteria through the process we call denitrification. This results in an overall loss of nitrogen from soils, as the gaseous form of nitrogen moves into the atmosphere, back where we began our story.
The cycling of nitrogen through the ecosystem is crucial for maintaining productive and healthy ecosystems with neither too much nor too little nitrogen. Plant production and biomass living material are limited by the availability of nitrogen. Understanding how the plant-soil nitrogen cycle works can help us make better decisions about what crops to grow and where to grow them, so we have an adequate supply of food. Knowledge of the nitrogen cycle can also help us reduce pollution caused by adding too much fertilizer to soils.
As you have seen, not enough nitrogen in the soils leaves plants hungry, while too much of a good thing can be bad: excess nitrogen can poison plants and even livestock! Pollution of our water sources by surplus nitrogen and other nutrients is a huge problem, as marine life is being suffocated from decomposition of dead algae blooms. Farmers and communities need to work to improve the uptake of added nutrients by crops and treat animal manure waste properly.
We also need to protect the natural plant buffer zones that can take up nitrogen runoff before it reaches water bodies. But, our current patterns of clearing trees to build roads and other construction worsen this problem, because there are fewer plants left to uptake excess nutrients. We need to do further research to determine which plant species are best to grow in coastal areas to take up excess nitrogen.
We also need to find other ways to fix or avoid the problem of excess nitrogen spilling over into aquatic ecosystems. Bacteria can cause decomposition or breaking down, of organic material in soils. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Plant Physiol. Frontiers in ecosystem ecology from a community perspective: the future is boundless and bright. Ecosystems — Eutrophication: causes, consequences, and controls in aquatic ecosystems.
In its liquid form, nitrogen is also colorless and odorless, and looks similar to water, according to Los Alamos. Nitrogen was discovered in by chemist and physician Daniel Rutherford, when he removed oxygen and carbon dioxide from air, demonstrating that the residual gas would not support living organisms or combustion, according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Other scientists, including Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestly, were working on the same problem, and called nitrogen "burnt" air, or air without oxygen. In , Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier, called nitrogen "azote," which means "lifeless.
One of the most important nitrogen compounds is ammonia NH 3 , which can be produced in the so-called Haber-Bosch process, in which nitrogen is reacted with hydrogen. The colorless ammonia gas with a pungent smell can be easily liquefied into a nitrogen fertilizer. In fact, about 80 percent of ammonia that is produced is used as fertilizer. It is also used as a refrigerant gas; in the manufacture of plastics, textiles, pesticides and dyes; and in cleaning solutions, according to the New York Department of State.
The nitrogen cycle, in which atmospheric nitrogen is converted into different organic compounds, is one the most crucial natural processes to sustain living organisms. However, as on Earth, nitrogen and its compounds occur commonly as gases in the atmospheres of planets and moons. Nitrogen occurs in all living organisms, primarily in amino acids which make up proteins, and nucleic acids DNA and RNA. The human body is about three percent nitrogen by weight, the fourth-most abundant element after oxygen, carbon, and hydrogen.
Nitrogen resides in the chemical structure of almost all neurotransmitters and is a defining component of alkaloids, biological molecules produced as secondary metabolites by many organisms.
The nitrogen cycle describes the movement of the element from the air into the biosphere and organic compounds and back into the atmosphere. Synthetically produced nitrates are key ingredients of industrial fertilizers and key pollutants causing the eutrophication of water systems. Nitrogen gas is an industrial gas produced by the fractional distillation of liquid air or by mechanical means using gaseous air i.
Commercial nitrogen is often a byproduct of air-processing for industrial concentration of oxygen for steelmaking and other purposes. When supplied compressed in cylinders, it is often called OFN oxygen-free nitrogen. In a chemical laboratory it is prepared by treating an aqueous solution of ammonium chloride with sodium nitrite, or through the decomposition of sodium azide:. Nitrogen is a nonmetal with an electronegativity of 3.
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