• Question: What elements are in a human skin cell?

    Asked by anon-202050 to Sophia, Sarah, Meirin, George, Emily, Andy on 7 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Sarah O'Sullivan

      Sarah O'Sullivan answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      I’m guessing largely hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen since that’s what the majority of human stuff is made of, water and proteins. It probably also has ions like calcium, sodium and magnesium as these are important for how cell membranes work and phosphorus as it’s used in a complicated compound called adenosine triphosphate which drives a lot of cell functions. There’s probably others in there that I don’t know of

    • Photo: Sophia Pells

      Sophia Pells answered on 8 Mar 2019:

      Pretty much everything in our body is made of just 6 elements: hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, calcium and phosphorous.

    • Photo: Emily Lewis

      Emily Lewis answered on 11 Mar 2019:

      as these guys have said, everything in your body is mainly hydrocarbons! most living things are all made of hydrocarbons. Possibly because they are among the most abundant elements on earth in the first place

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