Isolation of an indigenous imidacloprid-degrading bacterium and imidacloprid bioremediation under simulated in situ and ex situ conditions.

The Bacterial community structure and its complexity of the enrichment culture during the isolation and screening of imidacloprid-degrading strain were studied using denaturating gradient gel electrophoresis analysis. The dominant bacteria in the original tea rhizosphere soil were uncultured bacteria, Rhizobium sp., Sinorhizobium, Ochrobactrum sp., Alcaligenes, Bacillus sp., Bacterium, Klebsiella sp., and Ensifer adhaerens. The bacterial community structure was altered extensively and its complexity reduced during the enrichment process, and four culturable bacteria, Ochrobactrum sp., Rhizobium sp., Geobacillus stearothermophilus, and Alcaligenes faecalis, remained in the final enrichment. Only one indigenous strain, BCL-1, with imidacloprid-degrading potential, was isolated from the sixth enrichment culture. This isolate was a gram-negative rod-shaped bacterium and identified as the genus Ochrobactrum based on its morphological, physiological, and biochemical properties and its 16S rRNA gene sequence. The degradation test showed that approximately 67.67% of the imidacloprid (50 mg/l) was degraded within 48 h by strain BCL-1. The optimum conditions for degradation were a pH of 8 and 30°C. The simulation of imidacloprid bioremediation by strain BCL-1 in soil demonstrated that the best performance in situ (tea soil) resulted in the degradation of 92.44% of the imidacloprid (100 mg/g) within 20 days, which was better than those observed in the ex situ simulations that were 64.66% (cabbage soil), 41.15% (potato soil), and 54.15% (tomato soil).