Abstract
Organophosphates (OPs) are hazardous pesticides, but an indispensable part of modern agriculture; collaterally contaminating agricultural soil and surrounding water. They have raised serious food safety and environmental toxicity that adversely affect the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and therefore, it become essential to develop a rapid bioremediation technique for restoring the pristine environment. A newly OPs degrading Arthrobacter sp. HM01 was isolated from pesticide-contaminated soil and identified by a ribotyping (16S rRNA) method. Genus Arthrobacter has not been previously reported in chlorpyrifos (CP) degradation, which shows 99% CP (100 mg L-1) degradation within 10 h in mMSM medium and also shows tolerance to a high concentration (1000 mg L-1) of CP. HM01 utilized a broad range of OPs pesticides and other aromatic pollutants including intermediates of CP degradation as sole carbon sources. The maximum CP degradation was obtained at pH 7 and 32 °C. During the degradation, a newly identified intermediate 2,6-dihydroxypyridine was detected through TLC/HPLC/LCMS analysis and a putative pathway was proposed for its degradation. The study also revealed that the organophosphate hydrolase (opdH) gene was responsible for CP degradation, and the opdH-enzyme was located intracellularly. The opdH enzyme was characterized from cell free extract for its optimum pH and temperature requirement, which was 7.0 and 50 °C, respectively. Thus, the results revealed the true potential of HM01 for OPs-bioremediation. Moreover, the strain HM01 showed the fastest rate of CP degradation, among the reported Arthrobacter sp.