ABSTRACT
Aquatic environments receive increasing amount of contaminants, which could affect the ecosystems, endanger living-beings’ homeostasis, and risk human health. Besides pollution from anthropogenic sources, nowadays there is a growing concern about the effects of human activities on climate change. Environmental quality can be assessed by many methods (chemical, biological, ecological) that, if used individually, have limitations. Organisms and populations respond to stressors by changing different parameters (biomarkers) at biochemical, histological, immunological, physiological, or organismic levels. Biomonitoring requires the use of biomarker batteries, since contaminants induce many responses that are not necessarily correlated. In contrast to the so-called conventional or “classic” biomarkers, the omic approaches are becoming a powerful multidisciplinary strategy in environmental studies, since they monitor many biological molecules in an unbiased and high-throughput manner, providing a general appraisal of the biological responses altered by contaminants. Methodological limitations, mainly related to sample preparation for 2DE analysis, have been gradually overcome in the application of environmental proteomics. The relevance of redox proteomics is increasing as oxidative stress is one of the key modes of action of pollutant-induced toxicity. Since organisms dwelling in polluted environments modulate their responses via epigenetic changes, epigenetic “foot-printing” could identify chemical types to which an organism has been exposed throughout its lifetime.
