Summary

Pesticidesareusedinfruit-packagingplantsforthe protection of fruits during storage. According to European Commission the wastewaters produced contain high pesticide loads and should be depurated locally.  However, currently they are mainly discharged into nearby fallow fields leading to unacceptable environmental contamination requiring immediate bioremediation action. A Sphingomonas haloaromaticamans able to degrade ortho-phenylphenol, a Pseudomonas monteilii able to rapidly degrade diphenylamine and a Sphingomonas sp.in co-coculture with other proteobacteria able to rapidly degrade thiabendazole have been isolated and characterized by our research group. These bacteria will be the keystones of the project.

So far little is known regarding metabolic paths and gene/enzyme systems involved in their metabolism. This knowledge is essential before their application in bioremediation. BIOREMEDIAT-OMICS aims to provide new insights into the bacterial remediation of pesticide-contaminated wastewaters using omics complented with analytical methods. Wp1 will be devoted to the dissemination of the findings of the project respectively. In Wp2 pesticide-degrading bacteria (from the inventory of the research group) will be subjected to proteomic analysis to spot up-regulated enzymes with putative role in pesticide microbial degradation. Parallel genomic analysis will identify genes encoding the relevant enzymes and their involvement in pesticide metabolism will be verified in Wp3 via RT-qPCR. Further, in Wp4 potentially novel key catabolic genes will be isolated from soils collected from wastewater disposal sites which are expected to be heavily polluted with the studied pesticides via metagenomics. In Wp5 key catabolic enzymes (from Wp4 and 5) will be isolated and preliminary characterized. In Wp6, the results from the previous Wps will be used for the analytical verification of the pesticides metabolic pathway using HPLC-MS/MS. In Wp7 the bioaugmentation potential of the pesticide-degrading isolates will be tested in soils from wastewater disposal sites