Bioremediation of glyphosate by bacteria isolated from glyphosate contaminated soil

Glyphosate is an organophosphorus insecticide widely used as a herbicide. The intensive use of herbicides in agricultural soils is a matter of environmental concern. Glyphosate is toxic to environment, exploration of various glyphosate degrading bacteria to clean-up the pesticides is of immense importance. Four bacterial isolates were successfully isolated from glyphosate contaminated soil and were named GP-1, GP-2, GP-3 and GP-4. The isolates were capable of utilizing glyphosate as the sole source of carbon and were able to grow at 1000 mg/l concentrations of glyphosate. Effect of environmental conditions like temperature, pH and NaCl concentration was determined for all bacterial isolates. Most of bacterial isolates showed susceptibility for different antibiotics in antibiotic sensitivity test. Growth kinetics experiments showed that the bacterial isolates were able to grow in medium containing the glyphosate as the carbon source. Out of four bacterial isolates GP-4 was identified based on16S rRNA sequence analysis. Key words: Glyphosate, Organophosphorus, Growth kinetics, 16SrRNA