Pesticide residues degradation strategies in soil and water: a review

The benefits of using pesticides globally to control pests come at the cost of their ubiquitous occurrence in the ecosystem. The uncontrolled use of pesticides in agricultural practices, manufacturing and food industries and in health sector not only contaminates the environment but also affects non-targeted organisms. There are various biotic and abiotic methods of transforming or removing pesticides, but they may give rise to harmful end products. In this article, various techniques such as photodegradation, phytodegradation and biodegradation used to remove or transform pesticides in the environment are discussed. The current study revealed that use of UV or sunlight to degrade pesticides on soil surface is an effective method, but the results may vary in the laboratory and field conditions. The plants absorb these chemicals from the soil and metabolize it into simpler forms by different processes such as phytovolatilization, phytostimulation, phytoextraction and rhizodegradation. The bioremediation process using microbes or soil microflora to degrade pesticides is a cost-effective technique till date. Actinomycetes and cyanobacteria are the most efficient degraders among the micro-organisms. Microbes possess different enzymes such as Glutathione S-transferases (GSTs), esterases and cytochrome P450 which are involved in the degradation process.