Dissolved organic matter (DOM) chemistry and the potential for organic matter (OM) to self-associate with other OM components are important aspects of understanding the mechanisms of DOM sorption to clay surfaces. To investigate this further, we sorbed DOM isolated from peat humic acid onto either kaolinite, montmorillonite and gibbsite via ten sequential batch equilibration sorption experiments. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) sorption to all minerals increased consistently, suggesting that sorption occurred via mineral-OM interactions at the beginning of the experiment. After six successive DOM loadings, the concentration of DOC sorbed by kaolinite and gibbsite began to plateau, likely due to the saturation of mineral surface sorption sites. Solution-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analysis of unbound DOM showed that kaolinite and montmorillonite sorbed aliphatic, protein and lignin components initially and primarily aliphatic and aromatic constituents in later sorption experiments, whereas gibbsite sorbed mostly aliphatic compounds during all DOM loadings. Analysis of the organo-clay complexes using 1 H high resolution-magic angle spinning (HR-MAS) NMR confirmed the preferential sorption of aromatic and aliphatic components to all three minerals. Overall, these results suggest that OM-OM interactions may be important mechanisms of DOM sorption to clay mineral surfaces.Soil Syst. 2018, 2, 8 2 of 17 such as van der Waals forces and hydrogen bonding, while aromatic components were sorbed to a lesser extent and primarily by montmorillonite [14][15][16]. Although previous studies have provided molecular-level insight into sorption processes, most have only examined one DOM loading onto the mineral surface [8][9][10][12][13][14][15][16]. In soil, a mineral particle may be coated with several layers of OM to form organo-clay complexes [3,16,17], and the mineral sorption capacity for OM may decrease with successive OM loading as reactive surface functional groups become saturated with OM [18]. Currently, it is unclear whether mineral properties such as SSA and CEC continue to control DOM sorption with increasing OM layering [19][20][21][22], which may limit the amount of OM that can be sequestered by organo-mineral associations [23].Several studies have demonstrated that OM-OM interactions may also stabilize and protect OM from degradation in soil [24][25][26]. For example, protein encapsulation in humic acid prevented hydrolysis of a proteins by strong acid [26], while coating lignin with dodecanoic acid protected the lignin from chemical degradation by NaClO 2 [24]. Similarly, Thevenot et al. [25] observed that lignin and aliphatic soil OM components such as plant and microbial lipids were associated in ligno-aliphatic complexes, which may slow lignin degradation in soil. In another study, the removal of O-alkyl soil OM components by acid hydrolysis increased the sorption capacity of several soils for three organic contaminants [27]. This suggested that high affinity aliphatic and aromatic sorption domains in ...