Microbial assisted pesticide degradation: A review

Navpreet Kaur1* and Sukhpreet Kaur1

1
Department of Basic sciences, Guru Nanak College for Girls, Sri Muktsar Sahib, India.
Corresponding Author: maannavpreet@ymail.com
Pesticides enhance the crop production but their enormous usage pollutes the soil, water, air and
food products. The bio-accumulation of pesticides in food chain has negative health effects
which can minimized by adopting certain preventive measures such as controlled application of
the pesticides, promoting bio-fertilizers, integrated pest management approach, encouraging
organic farming and proper implementation of agrochemicals related rules and regulations
(Grewal et al., 2017). Biodegradation of pesticides has been studied was done by Singh and Iyer,
(2017) to isolate and identify dimethoate degrading microbes such as Bacillus licheniformis
(100% degradation) , Pseudomonas aeruginosa (96% ) , Aeromonas hydrophila (83%) , Proteus
mirabilis (72% ) and Bacillus pumilus (71% ) were isolated from pesticide contaminated soil. A
Bacillus subtilis strain, having a great potential for utilizing quinalphos as its carbon and energy
source was secluded by enrichment method (minimal salt media) from the soil (Gangireddygari
et al., 2017). In the another research carried out by Nair et al. (2014) the three bacterial isolates
i.e. Pseudomonas sp., Serratia sp., and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were found to be efficient in
degrading quinalphos by 86%, 82% and 94%, respectively.T he bacteria belonging to
Pseudomonas genus was found to be effective in degrading profenofos pesticide by 90% within
90 h (Malghani et al., 2009).About 98.9% degradation of endosulfan by fungal strain Aspergillus
niger was reported by Khizer et al. (2015). Puranik (2007) had also reported similar results for
the degradation of endosulfan by A. niger strain. Madhuban et al. (2011) demonstrated that
Burkholderia cepacia strain CH-9 was able to degrade imidacloprid and metribuzin by 69% and
86% respectively in 20 days. The researchers are successful in identifying the microorganisms
which are efficient in degrading the pesticides, but still, they lack behind in the field of
application. The applications of various microbial consortium developed by the researchers are
only limited to lab scale technology. Very little efforts have been taken to commercialize the
treatment technology at large scale level. Moreover, in the Malwa region of Punjab, almost all
types of pesticides are used; therefore there is a great need to develop a suitable consortium
which is effective for degrading the group of pesticides.
Key words: pesticides, organophosphates, bio-fertilizers, consortium.