ABSTRACT
Marine omics is the application of omics technologies, including genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics, for enhanced understanding of the association of living resources with marine and costal environmental on par with genetic factors, toxicity mechanisms, and modes of action in response to both acute and chronic exposure to environmental changes and, in the long term, development of diseases or disorders caused or inuenced by these exposures. Marine omics is still in the early stage of omics data collection and validation of molecular proles for identifying mechanisms of adaptation, assimilation, toxicity signatures, biomarkers, and pathways after exposure to marine environmental changes. Marine omics research can be roughly divided into three categories (Figure 28.1). The rst category focuses mainly on global climate change and environmental monitoring, enabling risk assessment. The second category focuses on health outcomes of living resources and environmental impacts, while the last category focuses on ecological functions and environmental adaptation. The primary goal of these research elds is similar, namely, to identify molecular changes, especially changes at the expression levels of mRNA, proteins, and metabolites, in cells or tissues exposed to global and local environmental changes, and to relate these molecular changes to ecological and health outcomes (Ge et al. 2013).
