The use and misuse of biomarkers in ecotoxicology
The use and misuse of biomarkers in ecotoxicology
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DOI：
10.1897/05-257r.1
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发表时间：
2006-01-01
影响因子：
4.1
通讯作者：
Bach, L
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Forbes, VE;Palmqvist, A;Bach, L
人们致力于开发和应用用于生态毒理学的生物标志物。这些努力的部分原因是希望早期预警指标能够在对个人和人群产生可衡量的影响之前做出反应，部分原因是为了帮助确定观察到的人群和社区层面影响的原因。较早的生物标志物侧重于生物体生理学或生物化学的测量，而分子生物学的进步正在将生物标志物理念扩展到基因水平（即生态毒基因组学）。然而，生物标志物在多大程度上能够提供明确且与生态相关的毒物暴露或影响指标仍然存在很大争议。在本文中，我们简要讨论了生物标志物在生态毒理学和生态风险评估中的应用，并提供了如何应用它们的例子。我们的结论是，尽管生物标志物有助于深入了解化学品对整个生物体性能产生观察到的影响的机制，并且在某些情况下可能提供有用的暴露指标，但不应期望个体生物标志物反应提供相关生态影响的有用预测，甚至可能无法预测整个生物体的影响。如果生物标志物套件能够用于将它们整合到适应性测量中的综合机制模型中，则它们才有可能提供更高的可预测性。在实现这一目标之前，生物标志物可能有助于在仔细控制的实验中生成假设。然而，由于环境监测和生态风险评估的目的是检测和/或预测化学物质对人口、社区和生态系统的不利影响，我们应该集中精力改进直接做到这一点的方法。这将涉及开发和测试具有适当复杂性的模型，这些模型可以在多个尺度上描述现实世界的系统。
Substantial efforts have been devoted to developing and applying biomarkers for use in ecotoxicology. These efforts have resulted partly from a desire for early warning indicators that respond before measurable effects on individuals and populations occur and partly as an aid to identifying the causes of observed population- and community-level effects. Whereas older biomarkers focused on measures of organism physiology or biochemistry, advances in molecular biology are extending the biomarker philosophy to the level of the genes (i.e., ecotoxicogenomics). However, the extent to which biomarkers are able to provide unambiguous and ecologically relevant indicators of exposure to or effects of toxicants remains highly controversial. In the present paper, we briefly discuss the application of biomarkers in ecotoxicology and ecological risk assessment, and we provide examples of how they have been applied. We conclude that although biomarkers can be helpful for gaining insight regarding the mechanisms causing observed effects of chemicals on whole-organism performance and may, in some cases, provide useful indicators of exposure, individual biomarker responses should not be expected to provide useful predictions of relevant ecological effects-and probably not even predictions of whole-organism effects. Suites of biomarkers are only likely to provide increased predictability if they can be used in a comprehensive mechanistic model that integrates them into a measure of fitness. Until this can be achieved, biomarkers may be useful for hypothesis generation in carefully controlled experiments. However, because the aims of environmental monitoring and ecological risk assessment are to detect and/or predict adverse chemical impacts on populations, communities, and ecosystems, we should be focusing our efforts on improving methods to do this directly. This will involve developing and testing models of appropriate complexity that can describe real-world systems at multiple scales.