Trends in the Application of "Omics" to Ecotoxicology and Stress Ecology

Abstract

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.

Keywords: cross-species; ecotoxicology; omics; review; stress ecology; taxa; technology; trends.

Figure 1

(A) Ecotoxicological and stress ecological studies between 2000 and 2020 that used one or multiple omics methods to investigate molecular changes following exposure to (environmental and chemical) stressors. (B) Word cloud showing representative model and non-model species studied across all years (only species with n > 2 studies are shown). Word size corresponds to the number of studies.

Figure 2

Alluvial diagram depicting the relative frequencies of phyla (left blocks) for which data on different omics levels (right blocks) have been generated between 2000 and 2020. Stream fields between the blocks are color coded based on taxonomic affiliation and represent the total number of times specific omics methods have been applied within the specified phyla.

Figure 3

Overview of stressors, phyla and species investigated using omics methods from 2000 to 2020. (A) Number of phyla studied for unique stressors (only stressors for which more than one phylum has been investigated are shown). (B) Line plot showing the number of unique stressors and species studied each year.