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
Ichthyosaur Graveyard Explained by the Flood
Ichthyosaurs are marine reptiles that occur globally in the same rock layers as dinosaurs. Specimens with babies support the idea that they gave live...

CREATION PODCAST
What Do We Do With Geology's Unconforming Features? | The Creation...
Welcome to the fifth episode in a series called “The Failures of Old Earth Creationism.” Many Christians attempt to fit old...

NEWS
Freshwater Fish Fossil in Australia
Yet another fish fossil has been discovered. This one was found in the Australian desert and was dated by evolutionists to be “15 million years...

NEWS
May 2025 ICR Wallpaper
"Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." (Romans...

NEWS
Acoustic Communication in Animals
We are all familiar with vocalizations in the animal world. For example, dogs bark, birds sing, frogs croak, and whales send forth their own distinct...

ACTS & FACTS
Creation Kids: Crystals!
by Michael Stamp and Susan Windsor* You're never too young to be a creation scientist and explore our Creator's world. Kids, discover...

APOLOGETICS
Playing Chess with Little Furry Critters
God’s multifarious and marvelous designs for basic creature needs are so innovatively clever and providentially purposeful that Christ’s...

ACTS & FACTS
Credit Only Our Creator
History was my favorite subject as a young kid. But it always puzzled me when my teachers said, “We study history so that we don’t repeat...

ACTS & FACTS
Genomic Tandem Repeats: Where Repetition Is Purposely Adaptive
Tandem repeats (TRs) are short sequences of DNA repeated over and over again like the DNA letter sequence TACTACTAC, which is a repetition of TAC three...

ACTS & FACTS
Dinosaur National Monument: Fossil Graveyard of the Flood
Straddling the border of Utah and Colorado, Dinosaur National Monument (DNM) is one of the richest exposures of dinosaur fossils in the world.1...