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.

Automated summary

Understanding how environmental changes impact the Earth's biome is crucial, with ecotoxicology and stress ecology playing key roles. Advancements in high-throughput omics technologies allow for measurement of molecular changes across different levels of biological organization. The literature trends suggest that more stressors are studied each year than species, highlighting the importance of cross-species comparisons in integrating omics information.