An Evaluation of Cyanobacterial Diversity in Paddy and their Capability to Degrade Pesticides

Abstract

Paddy is one of the important cereal crops in the world that provides staple food for nearly more than half of the world’s population. However 90 % of the world’s rice is produced and consumed in the Asian region where only 6 countries (China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Japan) comprising 80% of the world’s production and consumption. The FAO estimated the world paddy production in 2017 to 754.6 million tonnes (500.8 million tonnes, milled basis); that is slightly more than in 2016 to 748.0 million tonnes (496.7 million tonnes, milled basis).The variation in soil physico-chemical properties across different selected sites may effects the soil quality and fertility of the paddy agro-ecosystem (Schoenholtz, 2000; Tale and Ingole, 2015; Kekane et al., 2015). Several physicochemical parameters like soil temperature, pH, electrical conductivity, total -N, -P and organic-C leads to quality and nutrient status of the paddy field soil of adjoining areas of Telangana. Results showed that all the five sampling sites i.e. have suitable pH, EC and also good amount of nutrients (N, P and C) which well supported the cyanobacterial growth in paddy agro-ecosystem. There are various factors that affect the distribution and abundance of cyanobacteria in the paddy field but pH is an important factor and it has been observed that an increase in pH along with decrease in light intensity and less nitrogen favored cyanobacterial growth .This information about physico-chemical parameters of paddy field soil and its correlation with the cyanobacterial diversity could be very useful for further study. A wide variation in soil physico-chemical characteristics across different selected sites could be due to variation in anthropogenic activities and consequently variation in occurrence of different cyanobacterial species.