Humic substances characteristics

Detection of Soil Tillage Effects on Humic Substances Characteristics 673... 

A. Piccolo, S. Nardi, and G. Concheri, Structural characteristics of humic substances as related to nitrate uptake and growth regulation in plant systems. Soil Biol. Bio-chem. 24 313 (1992). 

Tanaka F, Fukushima M, Kikuchi A, Yabuta H, Ichikawa H, Tatsumi K (2005) Influence of chemical characteristics of humic substances on the partition coefficient of a chlorinated dioxin. Chemosphere 58 1319-1326... 

Humic acids (HA) and fulvic acids (FA) are the main components of humic substances (HS), which are the most chemically and biochemically active and widely spread fractions of nonliving natural organic matter in all terrestrial and aquatic environments. They comprise a chemically and physically heterogeneous group of substances with colloidal, polydis-persed, polyelectrolyte characteristics and mixed aliphatic and aromatic nature (Senesi and Loffredo 1999). 

Dissolved humic substances (DHS) are the main constituents of the dissolved organic carbon (DOC) pool in surface waters (freshwaters and marine waters), groundwaters, and soil porewaters and commonly impart a yellowish-brown color to the water system. Despite the different origins responsible for the main structural characteristics of DHS, they all constitute refractory products of chemical and biological degradation and condensation reactions from plant or animal residues and play a crucial role in many biogeochemical processes. 

The most striking characteristic of the dissolved humic substances is their chromophoric nature. As part of the DOM, they impart a yellow-brown cast to marine and freshwaters and, hence, are part of the CDOM pool. Terrestrial hiunic substances compose a significant fraction of the riverine DOM entering the ocean. In seawater, humic substances compose 5 to 15% of the HMW DOM. Differences exist in the bulk properties of marine and terrestrial humic substances. These are summarized in Table 23.6. They have been used to trace the fate of terrestrial organic matter in the ocean. 

Humic substances A series of relatively high-molecular-weight, yellow- to black-colored substances formed by secondary synthesis reactions. The term is used as a generic name to describe the colored material or its fractions obtained on the basis of solubility characteristics. These materials are distinctive to the soil (or sediment) environment in that they are dissimilar to the biopolymers of microorganisms and higher plants (including lignin)... 

Organic matter extracted from earth materials usually is fractionated on the basis of solubility characteristics. The fractions commonly obtained include humic acid (soluble in alkaline solution, insoluble in acidic solution), fulvic acid (soluble in aqueous media at any pH), hymatomelamic acid (alcohol-soluble part of humic acid), and humin (insoluble in alkaline solutions). This operational fractionation is based in part on the classical definition by Aiken et al. (1985). It should be noticed, however, that this fractionation of soil organic matter does not lead to a pure compound each named fraction consists of a very complicated, heterogeneous mixture of organic substances. Hayes and Malcom (2001) emphasize that biomolecules, which are not part of humic substances, also may precipitate at a pH of 1 or 2 with the humic acids. Furthermore, the more polar compounds may precipitate with fulvic acids. 

Both of these methods have been used for DOM isolation from major rivers and the surface ocean, and the general characteristics of these fractions of DOM are presented in Table I. The major C functional groups of humic substances and ultrafiltered DOM (UDOM) have been characterized by solid-state, cross-polarization magic angle spinning 13C nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The samples of humic substances that were characterized by NMR spectroscopy were collected from the Amazon River... 

Humic substances account for 40-70% of the DOC in rivers and 5-25% of the DOC in the ocean (Table I). It is important to note that recoveries of adsorbed humic substances from XAD resins are not quantitative, so the chemical characteristics of the recovered humic substances are not necessarily representative of all the humic substances retained by the resin. Tangential-flow ultrafiltration retains 45-80% of the DOC in rivers and 25-40% of the DOC in the surface ocean (Table I). Essentially all of the DOC retained during ultrafiltration is recovered for chemical characterization. In general, ultrafiltration recovers a larger fraction of the DOM from these systems. These methods also isolate DOM based on different mechanisms. Adsorption onto XAD resins at low pH chemically fractionates the DOM and isolates the more hydrophobic components, whereas ultrafiltration principally separates components of DOM on the basis of size and shape. 

Swift, R. S. (1989). Molecular weight, size, shape, and charge characteristics of humic substances some basic considerations. In Humic Substances II. In Search of a Structure, Hayes, M. H. B., MacCarthy, R, Malcom, R. L., and Swift, R. S., eds., John Wiley Sons, Chichester, pp. 449 166. 

Perminova, I. V., Frimmel, F. H., Kudryavtsev, A. V., Kulikova, N. A., Abbt-Braun, G., Hesse, S., and Petrosyan, V. S. (2003). Molecular weight characteristics of humic substances from different environments as determined by size exclusion chromatography and their statistical evaluation. Environ. Sci. Technol. 37, 2477-2485. 

Various separation methods have been used to isolate, fractionate, and characterize humic materials. Originally it was fractionation, based on solubility differences of humic components in diluted alkalis and acids, which laid the ground work for the first classifications of humic substances (HS) in the 19th century (Mulder, 1861 Sprengel, 1837) and provided for operational definition of HS (Kononova, 1966). And now, alkali extraction is the method of choice for isolating HS from solid humus-containing substrates like soil, peat, coal, and so on (Swift, 1996), while hydrophobic resins (e.g., Amberlite XAD resins) are typically used to extract HS dissolved in natural waters (Aiken, 1985). Initial research on HS began with the used simple separation methods to prove, examine, and define characteristics of components of humic matter (Oden, 1919).Today, however, advances in HS research require ever more sophisticated techniques of separation combined with structural analysis (Orlov, 1990 Stevenson, 1994). 

TABLE 13.1. SEC-Determined Molecular Weight Characteristics of Humic Substances from Different Sources as Reported in the Literature... 

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