Amino acids marine organic matter

Henrichs, S.M., and Farrington, J.W. (1987) Early diagenesis of amino acids and organic matter in two coastal marine sediments. Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 51, 1-15. 

Whelan, J.K., and Emeis, K. (1992) Sedimentation and preservation of amino acid compounds and carbohydrates in marine sediments. In Productivity, Accumulation, and Preservation of Organic Matter Recent and Ancient Sediments (Whelan, J.K., and Farrington, J.W., eds.), pp. 176-200, Columbia University Press, New York. 

McCarthy, M. D., Benner, R., Lee, C., Hedges, J. I., and Fogel, M. L. (2004). Amino acid carbon isotopic fractionation patterns in oceanic dissolved organic matter An unaltered photoautotrophic source for dissolved organic nitrogen in the ocean Marine Chemistry 92(1-4), 123-134. 

In addition to direct extraction of humic substances, the amount of humic substances has been estimated by subtracting the amount of biochemicals (sum of lipids, amino acids or proteins, and carbohydrates) from the total organic matter in the sediments (Kemp and Johnston, 1979). In this chapter, this difference is called nonbiochemicals, although no doubt there is much overlap between nonbiochemicals and extracted humic substances. As shown in Table 2, nonbiochemicals amount to 42-58% of the total organic matter in two Japanese lake sediments, but in the Great Lake (North America) sediments nonbiochemicals amount to 70-79% of the total organic matter on average. The latter values are close to those observed for marine sediments (Ishiwatari, 1979). 

The continued production of organic matter in the sea requires the availability of the many building blocks of life, including essential major elements such as carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) essential minor elements such as iron, zinc, and cobalt and, for many marine organisms, essential trace organic nutrients that they cannot manufacture themselves (e.g., amino acids and vitamins). These required nutrients have diverse structural and metabolic function and, by definition, marine organisms cannot survive in their absence. 

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