ABSTRACT
Microbes contribute to the biodiversity of the earth. They have important roles to play in several biogeochemical cycles in the biosphere. More than 1,070,000 bacteria and 747,000 fungi and yeasts are registered in the World Data Center for Microorganisms (WDCM). Apart from the use of microbes in ecosystems, agriculture, medicine, and industry, microbes have shown their potential to degrade certain hazardous substances such as pesticides. Pesticides are being widely used all over the globe. These have been considered hazardous with several physiological and biological implications on humans and animals via bio-magnification. Therefore, several methods are being investigated to degrade these harmful components involving physical, chemical, and biological approaches. Microbial degradation under biological degradation has proved to be a natural way of degrading pesticides due to great diversity of microbes, and variable metabolic pathways of microbial action. Different organisms have been found to be effective in the degradation of different categories of pesticides. For chlorinated pesticides, Actinomycetes, fungi, and bacteria have been found to be effective. Bacteria such as Bacillus, Flavobacterium, Acinetobacter, etc., fungi like Fusarium, Penicillium, Aspergillus niger, etc., and Streptomycetes under Actinomycetes have shown their effectiveness.
