ABSTRACT
Nowadays, pesticides play vital role for the modern agricultural system and widely used in preventing and controlling the pests all over the world. In spite of their welfares, pesticides are considered as hazardous environmental pollutants because of their stability, mobility, and long-term effects on living organisms as well as on soil health. According to World Health Organization (WHO), only 2–3% of the pesticides applied for mitigation of pests are effectively utilized at target point whereas rest remains in environment causing different types of pollution. The pesticides may go to surface runoff, leaching, and percolation into soil water environment leading to biota and finally human being through food chain. Therefore, their removal from the environment or their transformation into less toxic compounds is a topic of research interest worldwide. Although there are various traditional techniques for bioremediation of pesticides, but microbial degradation is an important process for bioremediation, and actinobacteria have a great potential for that. Actinobacteria are considered as the most prominent source of different types of enzymes having great catabolic activities for degradation of pesticides. In this chapter, we have highlighted the different advanced and effective bioremediation practices to degrade pesticide pollutants in the environment using actinobacteria. This chapter will provide clues for finding new research approaches in the highly challenging bioremediation field through microbial approaches, advanced tools, and technologies.
