Role of Microbes in Degradation of Chemical Pesticides

Abstract

Global population explosion and food security concerns have resulted in an increased use of toxic pesticides to prevent the cash food crops from pest-infestation or to minimize yield loss. These xenobiotic compounds are known to cause hazardous effect on human health and its inhabiting environment. The current chapter aims to summarize the innate ability of the soil microbial communities to metabolize the toxic pesticide compounds. Microbial-mediated pesticide degradation is a sustainable approach to restore the pesticide-infested environments back to its previous ecologically clean and balanced state. Researches based on the steering effect of various factors on the growth of pesticide biograders (viz. bacteria, fungi, cynobacteria) are only few, and change in the microbial dynamics and associated mechanistics of biodegradation, with changing pesticide type, are yet to be fully understood). However, advent of advanced tools such as genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics has tremendously helped researchers to gain the basic mechanistic understanding of microbial community dynamics and associated metabolic pathways involved in pesticide biodegradation, in order to make knowledge-based decisions to design better strategies to enhance pesticide degradation potential of microbes by manipulating its metabolic networks using genetic engineering approaches. This chapter will address the current state of the art of researches taking place in the area of microbe-assisted pesticide (xenobiotic compounds) degradation along with the integrative role of omics approaches in microbial-mediated bioremediation.