An Overview of Nitro Group-Containing Compounds and Herbicides Degradation in Microorganisms

Abstract

Over the last several decades, natural and manmade chemicals, including antimicrobial agents, antibiotics, personal care products, pesticides, herbicides, chlorinated aromatics and nitroaromatics, among others, have been used for various purposes in day-to-day life (Hoskeri et al. 2011, 2014; Megadi et al. 2010; Mulla et al. 2011a, b, 2016a, b; Tallur et al. 2015; Talwar et al. 2014). The long-term use of consumer products has released these chemicals to the environment, where they continually show up at levels from less than 1 nanogram to more than 1 microgram per litre (Mulla et al. 2012, 2014, 2016c, d, 2018). In recent years, several (including chloro and nitro group-containing aromatics) were found to be toxic to living beings— from humans to aquaculture organisms (Kovacic and Somanathan 2014; Edalli et al. 2018; Mulla et al. 2014, 2016c, d, 2017; Tallur et al. 2015). Various researchers from many countries have thus been prompted to investigate decontamination methods that would be effective on such chemicals (Arora et al. 2014, 2017; Burkul et al. 2015; Li and Yang 2018; Osin et al. 2018). Among the avenues considered, of the use of non-harmful biological mediators to detoxify toxic chemicals in wastewater treatment plants gained significantly more importance. In this chapter, we discuss some nitro group-containing compounds as used for degradation of toxic substances in microbes.