New Insights into Earth's Nitrogen-Balancing System | The Institute for Creation Research

New Insights into Earth's Nitrogen-Balancing System

All living animals—whether herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore—need food, and plants are at the beginning of the food chain.

Plants require a number of factors to regularly and reliably produce food, including carbon and nitrogen. Bacteria circulate these chemical elements in and out of the bodies of living creatures, and new research has revealed one of the key mechanisms that help make this possible.

All cells require nitrogen to build biochemicals such as DNA and proteins. The body cannot absorb nitrogen unless it is in a chemically reactive form, but most nitrogen that land creatures encounter is chemically unreactive. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria help solve this problem by cleverly converting the unreactive nitrogen into a usable form.1

But if that were the only nitrogen-related process, then pretty soon all of the atmosphere's unreactive dinitrogen gas would be depleted. Some bacteria are constantly "fixing" nitrogen into an absorbable form, while other types of bacteria are constantly "denitrifying" it into a gas. These processes balance one another to maintain life-appropriate amounts of both absorbable and inert nitrogen.

Biochemists have described for the first time the detailed mechanisms whereby anaerobic bacteria—which grow without oxygen—perform denitrification. Aerobic bacteria—which grow with oxygen—also do this, but they use different intermediate chemicals and different enzymes in the process.

In their report published in Nature, the researchers identified a suite of specialized enzymes that convert dissolved ammonium and nitrite into water and dinitrogen gas.2 The bacteria house the enzymes, which physically manipulate individual chemicals, in a special chamber called an anammoxosome.

Without nitrogen-manipulating enzymes in bacteria, tissues would stop growing and lungs would stop breathing. Now that the details of anaerobic nitrification are known, scientists better understand how the vital process of nitrification can occur in both oxygenated and oxygen-free environments. The fact that bacteria living in different environments can perform the opposite series of reactions makes earth's overall nitrogen-balancing system robust, responsive, and efficient.

At the smallest level, the enzymatic machinery in each kind of bacterium is stunningly well-engineered. At a much larger level, the continued maintenance of the overall nitrogen cycle by soil bacteria in varying environments is a well-designed meta-system. And all of it had to be put in place at the same time in the beginning in order for life to exist, just as Scripture teaches. These scientific observations show that life did not emerge millions of years after earth came into being, as evolution teaches, but that God created life during the same week that He formed the earth.

References

  1. Demick, D. 2002. The molecular sledgehammer. Creation. 24 (2): 52-53.
  2. Kartal, B. et al. 2011. Molecular mechanism of anaerobic ammonium oxidation. Nature. 479 (7371): 127-130.

* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.

Article posted on November 21, 2011.

The Latest
NEWS
Designed Deep-sea Vertebrates
Creationists marvel that God has designed creatures both small and big to inhabit a variety of punishing habitats. These examples include the bacteria...

CREATION.LIVE PODCAST
Beauty for Beauty's Sake! | Creation.Live Podcast: Episode 17
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right? Or is beauty an objective standard? Where do our ideas of beauty even come from?   Hosts...

NEWS
Fire Sensory Capabilities of the Venus Flytrap
Fascinating discoveries have been made regarding the amazing Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula).1 For example, all parts of this amazing plant...

CREATION PODCAST
What Really Swallowed Jonah? | The Creation Podcast: Episode...
The book of Jonah contains the historical account of the prophet Jonah. In verse 17 of chapter 1, the text states that the Lord prepared a great...

NEWS
More Flood Evidence
Paleontologists recently discovered the partial fossils of two new species of dinosaur just outside of Casablanca. As stated in a Science Direct article,...

NEWS
New York Times Editorial: Big Bang Unraveling?
Two physicists have suggested in a recent New York Times guest editorial that Big Bang cosmology ‘may be starting to unravel.’1...

NEWS
Your Functional ''Yolk Sac''
For decades, evolutionists pointed to dozens of ‘useless artifacts’ of the human body to make their questionable case for evolution. But...

NEWS
The Beauty of Creation: Created for God’s Own Glory
Have you ever wondered why a sunset on a beach is captivating, snowcapped mountains are breathtaking, and a valley filled with wildflowers is enchanting? Scripture,...

CREATION PODCAST
Devastating, Dangerous, and Deadly Bacteria? | The Creation Podcast:...
Bacteria are everywhere! While we can't see them with the naked eye, these little critters are everywhere, even in and on your body! Some of...

NEWS
Pre-Flood Reptile Fossil Discovered With Baleen
Baleen whales (suborder Mysticeti) are amazing filter-feeding mammals of the sea. They belong to a group called the Cetacea. Evolutionists suggest they...