SWQ has just published the paper Untargeted metabolomic analysis to explore the impact of soil amendments in a non-conventional wastewater treatment in Elsevier, Science of the Total Environment (Huidobro-López et al., 2023).

This article presents the work carried out in laboratory-scale infiltration columns to evaluate the effect of two soil amendments in a pilot vegetation filter (woodchips from the pruning of the poplar trees that constitute the vegetation filter and biochar from the pyrolysis of these woodchips). The study was carried out under the same field conditions and allowed us to recognise a very positive effect of the use of biochar as a soil amendment in the attenuation of contaminants of emerging concern (mainly pharmaceuticals and hormones) and some of their transformation products. In particular, the analysis of the samples collected during the essays has been carried out by a previously developed targeted LC-MS/MS (with triple quadrupole analyser) method and by a non-targeted LC-HRMS (with time-of-flight analyser) metabolomics strategy, developed specifically and also presented in this paper, which allowed the identification of metabolites/transformation products in unamended and amended soil.

The strength of this work lies mainly in the combination of the analysis of water and soil samples, which permitted a complete assessment of the fate of contaminants, as well as in the combination of the use of targeted and non-targeted analysis techniques, which allowed a more reliable assessment of the attenuation processes taking place at the soil-water contact, as the fact that a certain contaminant is not found does not mean that it has been completely degraded (mineralisation).

Blanca Huidobro-López, Carlos León, Isabel López-Heras, Virtudes Martínez-Hernández, Leonor Nozal, Antonio L. Crego, Irene de Bustamante. Untargeted metabolomic analysis to explore the impact of soil amendments in a non-conventional wastewater treatment. Science of The Total Environment, Volume 870, 2023, 161890, ISSN 0048-9697.

Temporary link to the full article

This work has been supported by the Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) through: i) Grant CTM2016-79211-C2-1-R funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF A way of making Europe and ii) Grant BES-2017-082064 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ESF Investing in your future.