Tanya Caceres (PhD Student)
University of South Australia

Project Title
Bioavailability of organophosphate pesticides in soil

Biography
Tanya did her first degree in Biology and Honours (first class) in Ecotoxicology at Catholic University of Ecuador, then obtained a MSc in Environmental and Ecological Sciences at Lancaster University, UK. She worked as a Nuclear Scientist at the Ecuadorian Atomic Energy Commission in collaboration with the Joint FAO/IAEA, her research was focused on the study of environmental fate of pesticides using nuclear and conventional techniques. Tanya also worked as a lecturer and research scientist at Catholic University of Ecuador in Quito. At present she is doing a PhD on Environmental Remediation and Public Health at UniSA.

Start Date
March 2005

Project Details
This project deals with an important problem, bioavailability of pesticides, which is of significant importance in risk assessment and depends on the characteristics of soil and pesticides as well as the organisms present in the soil habitat . The objectives of this study include:

• To study the effect of soil properties on bioavailability of fenamiphos in different types of soil.
• To test the toxicity of fenamiphos and its metabolites to different species
• To determine the effect of aging on the bioavailability of fenamiphos in soil
• To determine the cross degradative ability of Brevibacterium sp. to other structurally related pesticides to fenamiphos such as isofenphos .
• To optimize the conditions for effective degradation of the pesticides in soil by Brevibacterium sp.