Cotton is the world's most important non-food agricultural commodity, which is easily damaged by various sucking pests like jassids, aphids. thrips. whitefly, red spider, mites, mealy bug and bollworms. The indiscriminate use of pesticides for pest control has resulted in pollution affecting the non-target organisms. Pesticides and their residucs pose a major problem by their accumulation in different parts of the world in general and in different biological components of the food chain in particular. In the light of the importance and essentiality to overcome the deleterious effects of pesticides, in the present study an attempt has been made to isolate the fungal species capable of degrading organ phosphorus pesticides that are widely sprayed on cotton crop and develop a model for the control of pesticide pollution. The results may fit the findings of others on the ability of some fungi to degrade pesticides and introduce some new information on mineralization of organic constituent of pesticides.
It was elucidated that the fungal species are effective biodegrading agents. By optimizing the growth medium and different parameters like pH, temperature etc. and by large scale culture techniques,, the selected fungal species. Aspergillus niger. Trichoderma viride and Rhizopus Oligosporus can be very effectively used as an effective bioclcaners for the degradation of the selected pesticides malathion, chloropyriphos. triazophos and quinolphos which are intensively sprayed on cotton crop, which will be an economically effective microbial process and is an alternative for control of environmental pollution.
Key Words: pesticides, organophosphates, biodegradation, environmental pollution
