ABSTRACT
Physiology has had a long tradition of being intimately involved with the assessment of the health of humans. Human body experiences multiple stresses caused by job pressures, poor diet, disease organisms, and environmental pollutants, all of which affect human physiology. A toxic chemical in the water or other environmental stressor such as lack of oxygen will affect molecular functions within cells, altering metabolic activity, and permeability. If the stress is due to one or more contaminants, detoxification proteins may be induced to sequester or metabolize the toxic chemicals. The use of stress protein analysis in ecological monitoring is a new but rapidly expanding field. Stress proteins are a group of cellular proteins that are synthesized in response to virtually any kind of stress. The term hematology refers to blood plasma chemistry and the study of blood cells. Energetics is a wide-ranging field that can be examined at several levels of biological organization, ranging from the cellular to the ecosystem.
