Previous work by our group has shown that treatment of aquatic humic substance (HS) with sodium borohydride leads to considerable changes in their optical properties (Ma, et al., 2010) and reactivity (Golanoski, et al., 2012). These changes are consistent with a charge transfer interaction model (Del Vecchio and Blough, 2004) which predicts that aldehyde and ketone functional groups contribute significantly � albeit indirectly � to these important physicochemical properties of HS. In this study, we compared the mass spectra (obtained by ESI FT-ICR MS) of untreated, borohydride reduced, and borodeuteride reduced HS to confirm that all observable changes following borohydride/borodeuteride treatment are indeed due to the expected irreversible reduction of aldehydes and ketones to alcohols. Specifically, we looked for evidence for mass shifts of multiples of 2.0157 and 3.0219 Da, which correspond to the addition of H2 and HD, respectively.

Effects of borohydride reduction on the structure and composition of humic substances as observed by ESI FT-ICR mass spectrometry

245th National Meeting (2013)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.