Humic Substances: Conclusions & Acknowledgements

CONCLUSIONS


Humic substances are group of organic compounds formed by the association of high-molecular-mass substances from microbiological, vegetative and animal origin. They are organic macromolecules with multiple properties and high structural complexity. They exist abundantly in soil, natural water and various terrestrial and aquatic environments. The humic substances group can be divided into three components based on their solubility: fulvic acids, humic acids, and humin. Fulvic acids and humic acids represent alkali- soluble humus fragments and humin represents the insoluble residue. As for the structure, it is still not known, although there has been a breakthrough by Havel’s research group using CE and MALDI-TOF MS indicating that HAs should not be considered as high molecular weight compounds Regardless of the still unknown structure of humic substances and the great efforts to elucidate, it is known that their major functional groups include carboxylic, phenolic, carbonyl, hydroxyl, amine, amide and aliphatic moieties, among others. Due to this polyfunctionality, humic substances are one of the most powerful chelating agents among natural organic substances. The zwitterionic character of humic substances allows the interaction of anions with positively charged groups of humics and cations with negative charged groups of these substances. The unique chemical properties of humic substance products enable their application in industry, agriculture, environmental and biomedicine. In HAs there are compounds with potentially important pharmaceutical or medicinal properties and the search for or and investigation of these compounds is of great importance for pharmaceutical and biomedical applications.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT


This work was supported by Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport, MSM 143100007 and MSM
143100011, Czech Republic. E.M. Peña-Méndez would like to thank the Canarian Government
(Spain) for financial support.

Humic Substances Articles are all published in the Journal Of Applied Bio Medicine.