It has been widely recognized that pesticides represent a potential threat in aquatic and soil ecosystems. Glyphosate is a kind of antibiotics which has been extensively used in most countries. Its residues in environment bring to a potential hazard. However, the knowledge on the toxicity of pesticides to organism is still limited. The present work attempts to provide a summary of the utility and the environmental health problems of glyphosate applications. It comes in a number of chemical forms but most of the formulated products contain the isopropylamine salt. The toxicity of glyphosate is influenced by the surfactant in the product. In this review, the ecotoxicity of glyphosate on plants, aquatic organism amphibian, soil animal and mammal were discussed respectively combined with the latest research findings and the ecotoxicity at community level, individual level, cellular level and molecular level were summarized. This paper presented a comprehensive and critical review on glyphosate, we get the conclusion that, the toxic of commercial product of glyphosate is much stronger than the glyphosate acid, because the former contained surfactants. Generally, the toxicity order of the chemicals was:Surfactant>Roundup>Glyphosate acid>IPA salt, while the toxicity of glyphosate acid was mainly due to its high acidity. This paper also pointed out that the interactions of metal and glyphosate and their influence to organism. Interestingly, they can interact with each other, because its functional groups such as amine, carboxylate and phosphonate can react with metal ions to form metal complexes. As a result, metal can decrease the weeding efficiency of glyphosate, also, glyphosate can typically decrease the heavy metal bioavailability. Finally, under the intended conditions of herbicide use, glyphosate risks to subpopulations other than those considered here would be significantly lower. It is concluded that, under present and expected conditions of new use, there is no potential for glyphosate to pose a health risk to humans.
国家科技期刊平台
NSTL
万方数据
维普
