ABSTRACT
The current major challenges for environmental toxicologists and ecotoxicologists include the need to develop a mechanistic understanding of the toxic action of pollutants at a molecular level, and to understand how molecular and cellular events affect higher order (population and ecosystem) functioning (1). Postgenomic technologies will be vital in order to address these questions, and metabonomics could play a major role in helping do so. This chapter will summarize some of the advantages and disadvantages of NMR-based metabonomic profiling as applied to ecotoxicology, and review the progress that has been made to date.
