An increasing number of pesticides have been used in agriculture for protecting the crops from pests, weeds, and diseases but as much as 80 to 90% of applied pesticides hit non-target vegetation and stay as pesticide residue in the environment which is potentially a grave risk to the agricultural ecosystem. This review gives an overview of the pollution in agricultural soils by pesticides, and the remediation techniques for pesticide-contaminated soils. Currently, the remediation techniques involve physical, chemical, and biological remediation as well as combined ways for the removal of contaminants. The microbial functions in rhizosphere including gene analysis tools are fields in remediation of pesticide-contaminated soil which has generated a lot of interest lately. However, most of those studies were done in greenhouses; more research work should be done in the field conditions for proper evaluation of the efficiency of the proposed techniques. Long-term monitoring and evaluation of in situ remediation techniques should also be done in order to assess their long-term sustainability and practical applications in the field.

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The aquatic plant Hydrocotyle vulgaris was evaluated for its efficacy in removing prometryn from nutrient solution. Under optimized experimental conditions, up to 94.0% of the initial prometryn was removed from the hydroponic culture medium by H. vulgaris in 30 days. The concentration of prometryn decreased from the initial level of 0.55 ± 0.013 mg/L to 0.036 ± 0.001 mg/L at the end of the experimental period. The removal kinetics followed first-order kinetic equation (Ct = 0.4569e). Half-life (t) of prometryn was greatly shortened from 27.16 days (without plant) to 5.58 days (with H. vulgaris). Approximately 22% of the initial prometryn residue was found in H. vulgaris tissue, while 11.7% was degraded by the plant in 30 days. The metabolites of prometryn detected were 2,4-diamino-1,3,5-triazine (in the hydroponic culture medium) and 2,4,6-trihydroxy-1,3,5-triazine (in plant tissue) after 30 days. The results indicate that H. vulgaris can be used for phytoextraction of prometryn and could potentially be effective in removing other s-trazine pesticides from contaminated aquatic ecosystems.

Nitrogen chemiluminescence detector (NCD) is a nitrogen-specific detector that responds to ammonia, hydrazine, hydrogen cyanide and nitrogen oxide. A method to analyze the herbicide prometryn in plant and water samples was developed using gas chromatograph (GC) coupled with NCD. Extracts from plant (vetiver grass) and water matrices were analyzed for prometryn using an Agilent 7890A GC coupled with an Agilent 255 NCD in a split injection mode with a ratio of 2 : 1. Separation was carried out at 200°C and combustion at 1,018°C with H2 and O2 following optimized method development conditions. The percent recovery of prometryn in the two different matrices tested ranged from 81 to 107%, with relative standard deviations varying from 0.10 to 3.30% for spiked samples. Detection limit of the proposed method was 0.02 µg mL(-1) and the limit of quantification was 0.06 µg mL(-1). The proposed GC-NCD method was successfully applied to determine prometryn extracted from plant and water samples without potential interference of S-triazine, a pesticide from the same group.