Trends in the Application of “Omics” to Ecotoxicology and Stress Ecology

Our ability to predict and assess how environmental changes such as pollution and climate change affect components of the Earth’s biome is of paramount importance. This need positioned the fields of ecotoxicology and stress ecology at the center of environmental monitoring efforts. Advances in these interdisciplinary fields depend not only on conceptual leaps but also on technological advances and data integration. High-throughput “omics” technologies enabled the measurement of molecular changes at virtually all levels of an organism’s biological organization and thus continue to influence how the impacts of stressors are understood. This bibliometric review describes literature trends (2000–2020) that indicate that more different stressors than species are studied each year but that only a few stressors have been studied in more than two phyla. At the same time, the molecular responses of a diverse set of non-model species have been investigated, but cross-species comparisons are still rare. While transcriptomics studies dominated until 2016, a shift towards proteomics and multiomics studies is apparent. There is now a wealth of data at functional omics levels from many phylogenetically diverse species. This review, therefore, addresses the question of how to integrate omics information across species.

Stress Ecology in Mining Landscape: Postindustrial Deposits in Comparison with their Surroundings as the Environments for Selection of Plants with Small and Large Genome Size

This pilot case study compares genome sizes of two groups of species (conspecific plants) which spontaneously colonize interior space within abandoned industrial area and/or deposits, and those ones occurred in adjacent vicinity. Testing of the hypothesis “There is functional significance of small versus large genomes of plant species by comparing their occurrence in unreclaimed toxic deposits as an example of stressed environment and in their populations from neighbouring habitats” confirmed this idea.

Contributions from population genetics to ecotoxicology and stress ecology in light of transformation to the population genomic era

With the advent of the genomic era, which has partly been driven by advances in stress ecology, there is enormous growth in molecular and computer simulation techniques. Here we propose combining some of these techniques to give more elaborate risk assessments that include the effects of population variation in genotypes, phenotypes, and the way they link to aspects of life history and adaptive potential. We focused on ways to ascertain whether phenotypic plasticity or evolutionary responses constitute the basis for observed stress responses, as well as on the extrapolation problem, i.e. how do responses under controlled conditions correspond to those observed in natural ecological populations or in evolutionary end-points of interest? Additionally, we discuss the ways to integrate environmental variability into risk analysis and pest control predictions that include gene-environment interactions, focusing also on the importance of erosion of genetic diversity by toxic stressors to the risk of population extinction.