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Carbamates are synthetic pesticides, extensively used throughout the world due to their broad specificity against various insect pests. However, their enormous and inadequate use have made them a potential threat to the environment. At low temperature, degradation of carbamates becomes difficult mainly because of low biological activity. In the present study, we isolated a bacterial strain from a low temperature climate where the N-methylated carbamates are used for crop protection. The bacterium, was identified as Pseudomonas plecoglossicida strain (TA3) by 16S rRNA analysis. Degradation experiments with both free and immobilized cells in minimal salt medium indicated that the strain TA3 utilized carbaryl, carbofuran and aldicarb as both carbon and nitrogen source. TA3 can grow well at 4 °C and demonstrated the ability to degrade three carbamates (50 μgml−1) at low temperature. The immobilized cells were found more efficient than their free cells counter parts. Immobilized cells has ability to degrade 100% of carbamates at 30 °C while 80% at 4 °C but incase of their free cells counter parts the efficiency to degrade carbamates was less which was 60% at 4 °C and 80% at 30 °C. TA3 free cellsextract also depicted high activity against all the three carbamates even at 4 °C indicating a possible enzymatic mechanism of degradation.

Synthetic dyes are widely used as colorant compounds in various industries for different purposes. Among all the dyestuffs, azo dyes constitute the largest and the most used class of dyes. These dyes and their intermediate products are common contaminants of ground water and soil in developing countries. Biological methods have been found to be promising for the treatment and degradation of these compounds. In the present study, we focused on the biological removal of azo dyes (Reactive orange 16 and Reactive black 5) under aerobic conditions using an indigenous bacterial strain isolated from contaminated industrial areas. The bacterial isolate was identified as Bacillus cereus strain ROC. Degradation experiments under agitation with both free and immobilized cells indicates that this strain degrades both azo- dyes in 5 days. The immobilized cells were more proficient than their free cell counterparts. The toxicity of the biotransformation products formed after decolorization were assessed by conducting bacteriotoxic and phytotoxic assays. All the toxicity assays indicate that the dyes’ degraded products were non-toxic in nature, as compared to the dyes themselves. The kinetics of the azo dyes’ degradation was also studied at various initial concentration ranges from 50 mg/L to 250 mg/L by growth independent kinetic models. Zero-order kinetics were fit to the experimental data, producing values of least squares regression (R2) greater than 0.98, which indicates that the bacterial strain degrades both dyes by co-metabolism rather than utilizing them as sole energy source. These results indicate that the Bacillus cereus ROC strain has great potential to degrade dye-contaminated water and soil.

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