Optimization of biotic and abiotic factors liable for biodegradation of chlorpyrifos and their modeling using neural network approaches

Abstract Chlorpyrifos has a substantial risk to human health besides biodiversity. In the present study, a previously isolated bacterial strain Enterobacter sp. SWLC2 has been used to investigate its biodegradation potential in different soil-slurries systems and to optimize culture conditions to achieve enhanced biodegradation of chlorpyrifos. The optimization results indicate that the maximum (87%) spiked-chlorpyrifos biodegradation occurred in a sandy loam soil-slurry system in aeration mode after 18 days of incubation at the optimal temperature (35 °C) and pH (7). The effect of sources of carbon/nitrogen (organic sugars, organic acids, and amino acids, etc.) on the biodegradation of chlorpyrifos has been investigated and their optimal values are estimated. The neural networks have been designed to find the optimal values of earlier factors in the predictive modeling of degradation of chlorpyrifos.