Similarity Analysis of Livestock Wastewater and Carcass Leachate using Concentration Pattern of Amino Acid

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Research article

Journal of the Korean Society for Environmental Analysis 2012;15(4):307-313.

아미노산의 농도 특성을 이용한 축산폐수와 침출수의 유사도 분석

김지영, 유은진, 남용재, 이원석, 최성헌, 한진석, 최종우

국립환경과학원

Abstract

This study was conducted to analyze the composition of amino acids to develop of a method for tracing contamination sources in groundwater which is polluted by livestock wastewater or leachate from carcass burial sites. In this study, the FALCON (Fingerprinting Analysis of Leachate Contaminants) procedure was used to find unique characteristics in the samples of livestock wastewater and carcass leachate. For the livestock wastewater samples, Lysine accounted for the largest portion (23.39%), followed by alanine (21.93%) and glycine (6.94%). As for the composition of amino acids in carcass leachate, on the other hand, valine made up the highest percentage (28.72%), followed by leucine (19.25%) and isoleucine (15.40%), To identify distinct characteristics between livestock wastewater and carcass leachate in terms of their amino acid composition,individual data sets were estimated for the statistical reproducibility/comparability of fingerprint patterns, and consequently six amino acids such as valine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine and tryptophan were selected to develop the indicators. To statistically estimate the suitability of these six amino acids, the hierarchical clustering method was used. As a result, all samples except one livestock wastewater sample were clearly divided into two groups: livestock wastewater and carcass leachate. The similarity was 0.665 among the seven samples of livestock wastewater and 0.500 among the seven samples of carcass leachate, which shows that there are similar distribution patterns of amino acids among the samples of each group. On the other hand, the similarity between the two groups turned out to be 0.121, which indicates that livestock wastewater and carcass leachate have significantly different characteristics from each other in terms of amino acid concentration. Therefore, this method of analyzing the composition of amino acids may be useful to trace contamination sources at monitoring locations with pollution fingerprints.

Key Words: amino acids, carcass leachate, livestock wastewater, trace contamination sources, tracer