Abstract. The interest for organic nitrogen and particularly for quantifying and studying the fate of amino acids (AA) has been growing in the atmospheric science community. However very little is known about biotic and abiotic transformation mechanisms of amino acids in clouds. In this work, we measured the biotransformation rates of 18 amino acids with four bacterial strains (Pseudomonas graminis PDD-13b-3, Rhodococcus enclensis PDD-23b-28, Sphingomonas PDD-32b-11 and Pseudomonas syringae PDD-32b-74) isolated from cloud water and representative of this environment. At the same time, we also determined the abiotic (chemical, OH radical) transformation rates within the same solutions mimicking the composition of cloud water. We used a new approach by UPLC-HRMS to quantify free AA directly in the artificial cloud water medium without concentration and derivatization. The experimentally-derived transformation rates were used to compare their relative importance under atmospheric conditions and compared to the chemical loss rates based on kinetic data of amino acid oxidation in the aqueous phase. This analysis shows that previous estimates overestimated the abiotic degradation rates, and thus underestimated the lifetime of amino acids in the atmosphere as they only considered loss processes but did not take into account the potential transformation of amino acids into each other.