An Overview of Persistence and Metabolism of Imidacloprid and Advances in its Estimation Techniques

Imidacloprid is a widely used pesticide in agriculture for controlling sucking insect pests, as a seed dressing, for soil treatment and as a foliar treatment in a variety of crops and orchards. Imidacloprid undergoes extensive metabolism in plants and forms monohydroxy imidacloprid, imidacloprid guanidine, imidacloprid olefin and a monoglucoside of 6-chloropicolyl alcohol. The majority of toxicity studies have been focused on the parent compound, imidacloprid. The metabolites of imidacloprid viz. olefin and nitrosimine have greater insecticidal activity than the parent compound. The guanidine metabolite does not possess insecticidal properties, but has a higher mammalian toxicity than the parent compound. Despite the beneficial impacts of this pesticide in improving and stabilizing agricultural productivity by controlling obnoxious weeds, fungi and insects, these allocthonous organic chemicals are known to contaminate soil ecosystem and pose threat to the balanced equilibrium among various groups of microorganisms in soil, which play an important role in recycling plant nutrients. Although much information is available on bioefficacy of imidacloprid against various insect pests of different crops, there is not much information available on the residues, metabolism and persistence of imidacloprid in cotton and soil in a consolidated manner and hence the authors aim to present the data on persistence and metabolism of imidacloprid and advances in its estimation technique already published separately. Author Info Pesticide Residue Analysis Laboratory, Department of Entomology, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana-141004, *Corresponding author’s email: sksahoo_2006@rediffm ail.com