Dimethoate degrading efficiency of Bacillus paramycoides isolated from pesticide influenced rhizospheric soil of sugarcane field in Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Pesticides are inevitable part of Indian agriculture. Statistically, India is one of the top producer of pesticide over the world. As a developing country, abundance use of pesticide is quite common and organophosphates (OPP) being one of them. Known for causing acute toxicity, OPPs are needed to be used controllably and residues released into the environment should be treated to render harmless. Biological degradation is one of the effective ways to achieve that. However, exploring potential candidate for the purpose is still not sufficient compared to the necessity to alleviate OPP from environment. In this study, dimethoate, a subclass of OPP has been studied for microbial degradation using bacteria Bacillus paramycoides, isolated from rhizospheric soil of sugarcane cultivation fields pre-exposed to pesticide dimethoate for considerable long time. The strain has been extensively studied to check its prospect on environmental stress, pesticide tolerance and degradation efficiency. The isolate was found to degrade dimethoate by 97.6% in 5 days with a tolerance of 1000ppm of targeted pesticide. Emphasis have also been made to detect the secondary metabolites produced by the isolate using GCMS analysis and the functional groups were confirmed by FTIR. Significant biologically important metabolites obtained from B.paramycoides were also reported in this study which are known to have having anticancerous, antibacterial properties. This work presumably is the first communication prospecting B.paramycoides for dimethoate degradation.