Abstract. The interest in organic nitrogen and particularly in quantifying and
studying the fate of amino acids (AAs) has been growing in the atmospheric-science community. However very little is known about biotic and abiotic transformation mechanisms of amino acids in clouds. In this work, we measured the biotransformation rates of 18 amino acids with
four bacterial strains (Pseudomonas graminis PDD-13b-3, Rhodococcus enclensis PDD-23b-28, Sphingomonas sp. PDD-32b-11, and Pseudomonas syringae PDD-32b-74) isolated from cloud water and representative of this
environment. At the same time, we also determined the abiotic (chemical, OH
radical) transformation rates within the same solutions mimicking the
composition of cloud water. We used a new approach by UPLC–HRMS (ultra-performance liquid chromatography–high-resolution mass spectrometry) to quantify
free AAs directly in the artificial-cloud-water medium without concentration
and derivatization. The experimentally derived transformation rates were used to compare their
relative importance under atmospheric conditions with loss rates based on kinetic data of amino acid oxidation in the aqueous phase. This analysis shows that previous estimates overestimated the
abiotic degradation rates and thus underestimated the lifetime of amino
acids in the atmosphere, as they only considered loss processes but did not
take into account the potential transformation of amino acids into each
other.