Process optimization of cypermethrin biodegradation by regression analysis and parametric modeling along with biochemical degradation pathway

Pyrethroid pesticides are of great environmental and health concern with regard to neurotoxicity and ubiquitous occurrence. Here, we reported a new bacterial strain identified as Bacillus cereus AKAD 3–1 that degraded 88.1% of 50 mg/l of cypermethrin in an aqueous medium. The biodegradation of cypermethrin was optimized by CCD (central composite design) and validated by ANN-GA (artificial neural network-genetic algorithm). Both the approaches proved to possess good performance in modeling and optimizing the growth conditions. Results indicated that the process variables have a significant (< 0.0001) impact on cypermethrin biodegradation. Moreover, the predicted CCD model had a “lack of fit p -value” of “0.9975.” The optimum CCD and ANN model had an R 2 value of 0.9703 and 0.9907, indicating that the two models’ experimental and predicted values are closely fitted. The isolate successfully converted cypermethrin to CO 2 and phenol without producing any toxic metabolite. Finally, a degradation pathway was proposed with the intermediate compounds identified by GC–MS. The present study highlights an important potential application of strain AKAD 3–1 for the in situ bioremediation of cypermethrin-contaminated environments.