11 Facts About Redfield ratio

In 1958, almost a quarter century after first discovering the ratios, Redfield leaned toward the latter mechanism in his manuscript, The Biological Control of Chemical Factors in the Environment.

Redfield ratio considered how the cycles of not just N and P but C and O could interact to result in this match.

Redfield ratio discovered the remarkable congruence between the chemistry of the deep ocean and the chemistry of living things such as phytoplankton in the surface ocean.

Redfield ratio thought it wasn't purely coincidental that the vast oceans would have a chemistry perfectly suited to the requirements of living organisms.

Research that resulted in this Redfield ratio has become a fundamental feature in the understanding of the biogeochemical cycles of the oceans, and one of the key tenets of biogeochemistry.

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The Redfield ratio is instrumental in estimating carbon and nutrient fluxes in global circulation models.

Redfield ratio was initially derived empirically from measurements of the elemental composition of plankton in addition to the nitrate and phosphate content of seawater collected from a few stations in the Atlantic Ocean.

However, the Redfield ratio was recently found to be related to a homeostatic protein-to-rRNA ratio fundamentally present in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes.

Furthermore, the Redfield ratio has been shown to vary at different spatial scales as well as average slightly higher than Redfield's original estimate.

In some ecosystems, the Redfield ratio has been shown to vary significantly by the dominant phytoplankton taxa present in an ecosystem, even in systems with abundant nutrients.

Consequently, the system-specific Redfield ratio could serve as a proxy for plankton community structure.