The increasingly rapid growth of both, population- and food demands has driven a research race in food production efficiency through the last century, which has made the pesticide use seemingly unavoidable. However, many pesticides are very persistent and tend to accumulate in the ecosystem, often threatening biodiversity and public health. From the remediation technologies to reduce pesticide pollution, and bioremediation approaches, such as bioaugmentation and biostimulation, are the most cost effective and environmentally friendly.

This project, framed in the AAU-FMC corporation colaboration, aimed to reduce the persistance of five given pesticides, with the development of an efficient bioaugmentation strategy. For this matter, three potentially pesticide-degraders rich environmental samples were used as inoculum in an eleven weeks enrichment with the five given pesticides. After the enrichment 42 strains were isolated whith a potential ability to degrade pesticides, and 6 were screened in three of the pesticides (along with 12 screened in a parallel project), to find one strain degrading the pesticide dicamba. Different consortia were constructed with the efficient degraders found in this and the parallel study, but no degradation was found. Degradation tests were performed with \textit{P. putida} and \textit{S. marcescens} to find out that \textit{S. marcescens} was only capable of degrading dicamba in the presence of surfactants.

Basing on the results of the metagenomic studies, the HPLC tests, and the degradation experiments, it was concluded that more experiments should be performed to validate the HPLC methods used to further screen and study the strains isolated, and that some tests could be performed to optimize the obtaining of efficient degraders from the enrichment. However, if the sequencing results of the three potential pesticide degraders confirm these results, the enrichment strategy would be proven to be effective to obtain pesticide degrading strains for pesticide bioremediation.