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Nontarget effects of chemical pesticides and biological pesticide on rhizospheric microbial community structure and function in Vigna radiata

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Abstract

Intensive agriculture has resulted in an indiscriminate use of pesticides, which demands in-depth analysis of their impact on indigenous rhizospheric microbial community structure and function. Hence, the objective of the present work was to study the impact of two chemical pesticides (chlorpyrifos and cypermethrin) and one biological pesticide (azadirachtin) at two dosages on the microbial community structure using cultivation-dependent approach and on rhizospheric bacterial communities involved in nitrogen cycle in Vigna radiata rhizosphere through cultivation-independent technique of real-time PCR. Cultivation-dependent study highlighted the adverse effects of both chemical pesticide and biopesticide on rhizospheric bacterial and fungal communities at different plant growth stages. Also, an adverse effect on number of genes and transcripts of nifH (nitrogen fixation); amoA (nitrification); and narG, nirK, and nirS (denitrification) was observed. The results from the present study highlighted two points, firstly that nontarget effects of pesticides are significantly detrimental to soil microflora, and despite being of biological origin, azadirachtin exerted negative impact on rhizospheric microbial community of V. radiata behaving similar to chemical pesticides. Hence, such nontarget effects of chemical pesticide and biopesticide in plants’ rhizosphere, which bring out the larger picture in terms of their ecotoxicological effect, demand a proper risk assessment before application of pesticides as agricultural amendments.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, for funding this project (SR/FT/LS-181/2009). Dr. Laurent Philippot’s (INRA, Dijon, France) kind help by providing the standard strains for qPCR is highly acknowledged.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, Hauz Khas, New Delhi, 110016, India

    Sunil Singh, Rashi Gupta, Madhu Kumari & Shilpi Sharma

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  1. Sunil Singh
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  2. Rashi Gupta
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  3. Madhu Kumari
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  4. Shilpi Sharma
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Correspondence to Shilpi Sharma.

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Responsible editor: Robert Duran

Electronic supplementary material

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Online resource 1

Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMS) to compare effects of different pesticide treatments on fungal community (a) nitrogen fixing bacteria (b) Pseudomonas spp. (c) and phosphate solubilizing bacteria (d). L low dose, H high dose, A azadirachtin, C chlorpyrifos, CY cypermethrin. (DOC 149 kb)

Online resource 2

Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMS) to compare effects of different pesticide treatments on the abundance of nifH gene (a) and transcripts (b) at three different time points. For abbreviations please refer to legend for Online resource 1. (DOC 77 kb)

Online resource 3

Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMS) to compare effects of different pesticide treatments on the abundance of amoA gene (a) and transcripts (b) at three different time points. For abbreviations please refer to legend for Online resource 1. (DOC 75 kb)

Online resource 4

Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMS) to compare effects of different pesticide treatments on the abundance of narG gene (a) narG transcripts (b) nirK gene (c) nirK transcripts (b) nirS gene (a) and nirS transcripts (b) at three different time points. For abbreviations please refer to legend for Online resource 1. (DOC 174 kb)

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Singh, S., Gupta, R., Kumari, M. et al. Nontarget effects of chemical pesticides and biological pesticide on rhizospheric microbial community structure and function in Vigna radiata . Environ Sci Pollut Res 22, 11290–11300 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-015-4341-x

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