Comparison of compositional characteristics of amino acids between livestock wastewater and carcass leachate

This study was purposed to examine the use of amino acids as an indicator to determine whether groundwater around carcass burial sites is polluted by livestock wastewater (LW) or carcass leachate (CL). The analysis of samples showed that the average amino acid concentration of carcass leachate (531.897 mg/L; 4341.784 μmol/L) was about 300 times as high as that of livestock wastewater (1.755 mg/L; 16.283 μmol/L). To identify distinct characteristics between LW and CL, six amino acids were paired with one another to calculate their relative composition ratios, which were found to be Leu/Trp (CL 8.39∼98.6, LW 0.89∼4.77), Val/Trp (CL 11.95∼175.38, LW 0.73∼3.62), Lys/Leu (CL 0.01∼0.72, LW 0.96∼8.44), Lys/Ile (CL 0.02∼1.55, LW 1.64∼10.99), Met/Lys (CL 0.14∼0.45, LW 0.03∼0.14), and Ile/Val (CL 0.38∼0.73, LW 0.40∼0.97). The hierarchical clustering result showed that the similarity was 0.617 among the seven LW samples and 0.563 among the seven CL samples, while the similarity between LW and CL samples was 0.198, presenting that these two sources are distinct from each other. All these results indicate that amino acids can be used as a tracer to evaluate if the contamination source is livestock wastewater or carcass leachate. To apply amino acids to tracing pollutants more effectively, however, further studies are needed to understand whether the relative abundance ratios of amino acids are maintained as they are transporting through soils as a medium.