Screening of various harmful compounds in a new bacterial biological model

The rapidly increasing population corroborated with a growing industrialization has resulted in the bioaccumulation in the environment of a large variety of chemical compounds. More
than fifty thousand chemicals, most of which are xenobiotics, are in common use. Furthermore, new
chemicals are continually and regularly introduced to the environment raising the concern about their
bioaccumulation as well as the harmful effect of xenobiotics as such or as metabolite products. There
are a few pollution treatment methods such as land-filing, recycling, pyrolysis and incineration, but
unfortunately they can lead to the formation of toxic intermediates. In addition, these methods are
expensive and sometimes more difficult to execute, especially in extensive agricultural sites where the
use of pesticides is wide-spread. The harmful effect of chemical compounds on organisms living in a
polluted area is assessed by acute and chronic toxicity tests performed on various biological models
including fih, crustaceans, algae, etc. More recently, based on microorganism long-term ability
to adapt to environments, they became an useful tool to assess the toxicity of harmful compounds
released in the environment. In this study, we used a bacterial model as biosensors for detecting the
harmful effect of pesticides as well as decontaminants of pesticide-infested environment. The gram positive and gram-negative bacteria proved to be a simple, rapid and inexpensive tool to determine
the ecotoxicity of Reldan EC40 pesticide.