RESEARCH ARTICLE Molecular markers in ambient aerosol in the Mahanadi Riverside Basin of eastern central India during winter Jayant Nirmalkar & Manas K. Deb & Dhananjay K. Deshmukh & Ying I. Tsai & Santosh K. Verma Received: 1 January 2014 /Accepted: 5 August 2014 /Published online: 19 August 2014 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014 Abstract Organic molecular markers are important atmo- spheric constituents. Their formation and sources are impor- tant aspects of the study of urban and rural air quality. We collected PM 10 aerosol samples from the Mahanadi Riverside Basin (MRB), a rural part of eastern central India, during the winter of 2011. PM 10 aerosols were characterized for molec- ular markers using ion chromatography. The concentration of PM 10 ranged from 208.8 to 588.3 μgm -3 with a mean concentration of 388.9 μgm -3 . Total concentration of anhydrosugars, sugar alcohols, primary sugars, and oxalate were found to be 3.25, 5.60, 10.52, and 0.37 μgm -3 , respec- tively, during the study period. Glucose was the most abun- dant species followed by levoglucosan and mannitol. Significant positive correlation between the molecular markers, anhydrosugars, sugar alcohols, primary sugars, and oxalic acid confirmed that biomass burning, biogenic activity, and re-suspension of soil particles were the main sources of aerosol in the eastern central India study area. Keywords Biomass burning . Anhydrosugars . Sugars . Oxalic acid . Temporal variation . Correlation analysis Introduction Tropospheric aerosol particles are produced by both natural and anthropogenic activities (Watson et al. 2005; Lin et al. 2008; Bencardino et al. 2014). They play a significant role in regional and global climate change (Jacobson et al. 2000; Amodio et al. 2012), atmospheric chemistry (Jacobson 2001), biogeochemi- cal carbon cycle (Ramanathan et al. 2001), pollution transport (Chen et al. 2013), and human health (Seinfeld and Pandis 1998; Pope et al. 2011). All these features are strongly affected by the chemical composition and concentrations of the aerosol particles. Their chemical constituents can be divided into inor- ganic and organic groups. Organic constituents are important because they account for a substantial fraction of atmospheric particles and potentially affect the hygroscopic properties (Seinfeld and Pandis 1998; Kanakidou et al. 2005), contribute a large portion to the terrestrial input of organic carbon over the remote oceans (Kawamura and Gagosian 1990; Pietrogrande et al. 2011), as well as causing human health problems (Brunekreef and Forsberg 2005; Pope et al. 2011). Water-soluble organic compounds (WSOC) constitute a substantial fraction of atmospheric organic matter (Graham et al. 2002; Tsai et al. 2010; Alier et al. 2014), accounting for 10–90 % of organic carbon content in fine ambient aerosols depending on location. Primary organic aerosols (POA) and secondary organic aerosols (SOA) are ubiquitous in the atmo- sphere (Robinson et al. 2007; Hallquist et al. 2009). Pyrogenic low molecular weight (LMW) polar compounds such as anhydrosugars (Bracero et al. 2002), sugar alcohols (Gao et al. 2003), primary sugars and oxalic acid (C 2 ) (Agarwal et al. 2010; Fu et al. 2010), as well as several sugar derivatives have been identified as major products of vegetative cellulose Responsible editor: Gerhard Lammel J. Nirmalkar : M. K. Deb School of Studies in Chemistry, Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur 492010, India D. K. Deshmukh Institute of Low Temperature Science, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-0819, Japan Y. I. Tsai(*) Department of Environmental Resources Management, Chia Nan University of Pharmacy and Science, Tainan 71710, Taiwan e-mail: mtsaiyi@mail.chna.edu.tw Y. I. Tsai e-mail: mtsaiyi@mail.cnu.edu.tw S. K. Verma State Forensic Science Laboratory, Raipur 492010, India Environ Sci Pollut Res (2015) 22:1220–1231 DOI 10.1007/s11356-014-3416-4