Environmental Metabolic Footprinting (EMF) vs. half-life: a new and integrative proxy for the discrimination between control and pesticides exposed sediments in order to further characterise pesticides’ environmental impact

Abstract

Pesticides are regularly used for a variety of applications and are disseminated throughout the environment. These substances may have significant negative impacts. To date, the half-life, t, was often used to study the fate of pesticides in environmental matrices (water, soil, sediment). However, this value gives limited information. First, it does not evaluate the formation of by-products, resulting in the need for additional experiments to be performed to evaluate biodegradation and biotransformation products. T also fails to consider the chemical's impact on biodiversity. Resilience time, a new and integrative proxy, was recently proposed as an alternative to t, with the potential to evaluate all the post-application effects of the chemical on the environment. The 'Environmental Metabolic Footprinting' (EMF) approach, giving an idea of the resilience time, was used to evaluate the impact of botanicals on soil. The goal is to optimise the EMF to study the impact of a microbial insecticide, the Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti), on sediment. The difficulty of this work lies in the commercial solution of Bti that is really complex, and this complexity yields chromatograms that are extremely difficult to interpret; t cannot be used. No methodologies currently exist to monitor the impact of these compounds on the environment. We will test the EMF to determine if it is sensitive enough to tolerate such complex mixtures. A pure chemical insecticide, the α-cypermethrin, will be also studied. The article shows that the EMF is able to distinguish meta-metabolome differences between control and exposed (with Bti) sediments.

Pesticide Determination in Water Samples from a Rural Area by Multi-Target Method Applying Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry

“…9 Regardless of the concentrations, these products can present higher toxicity than the original compounds and may have a straight correlation with the increasing number of diseases, like cancer. [10][11][12][13][14] Besides pesticides, the presence of other emerging contaminants in the environment, such as industrial compounds, pharmaceuticals, personal care products and disinfection by-products, results in negative effects in living organisms due to the non-target effect and contributes to increase surface and groundwater pollution. 15,16 Recent studies have shown that the exposure of parents before a child's birth increases the risk of infant leukemia and Parkinson's disease to 70%.…”

Does in vitro selection of biocontrol agents guarantee success in planta? A study case of wheat protection against Fusarium seedling blight by soil bacteria

“…This leads to a problematic emergence of resistance to chemical pesticides in the phytopathogens [7]. Methods have been developed to evaluate the impact of pesticides on the environment, and they allowed to show that pesticide applications must be reduced to limit human health problems, environmental contamination and reduced soil fertility [7–9]. Simultaneously, new ways of crop production grouped under the generic term Integrated Pest Management (IPM) have been developed to control pests in agriculture.…”

Removal and extraction efficiency of Quaternary ammonium herbicides paraquat (PQ) from aqueous solution by ketoenol–pyrazole receptor functionalized silica hybrid adsorbent (SiNPz)

“…Lately, agricultural types in Palestine are aiming to avoid low plant development and increase the production and the quality of the products. These changes help to introduce higher levels of herbicides in the agricultural ecosystem [4]. The main output of these agricultural practices is the contamination of soils and waters, which leads to degrade the soil–water–plant system and bioaccumulate herbicide residues.…”

“…In the last years, several studies have been given to PQT 2+ , mainly due to the high rate of poisoning and fatalities attributed to it [4].…”