A powerful helper of azoxystrobin degradation-the unique mechanism of UGT72E2 promoting environmental degradation of azoxystrobin

In recent years, environmental pollutants such as pesticide residues have become one of the severe public problems that endanger the ecological environment and affect human health. The development of biotechnology to rapidly and efficiently degrade pesticides is essential to reduce their environmental risks. Azoxystrobin (AZ) is representative of the most widely used agricultural fungicide in the world. A large number of studies have shown that AZ has toxic effects on non-target organisms such as fish, algae, earthworms, etc., which may pose a potential threat to the environmental ecosystem. Therefore, it is particularly important to develop new AZ phytoremediation methods. Based on the constructed Arabidopsis UGT72E2 knockout (KO) and overexpression (OE) lines, this study found that overexpression of UGT72E2 in Arabidopsis can enhance resistance to exogenous AZ stress and maintain a relatively stable physiological state while enhancing the metabolic degradation of AZ. Correspondingly, knockout mutants showed the opposite results. The results showed that the AZ glycosylation and malonyl glycosylation products produced by UGT72E2 overexpression lines increased by 10%~20% compared with normal lines, and increased by 7%~47% compared with gene knockout plants, and exhibited lower phytotoxicity. In summary, our findings highlight the critical role of UGT72E2 overexpression in constructing new varieties of phytoremediation and may provide new ideas for reducing the indirect or direct risks of pesticides or other environmental pollutants to non-target organisms and improving biological and environmental resilience.