BACKGROUND Biomarkers have been used extensively to provide the connection between external levels of contaminant exposure, internal levels of tissue contamination, and early adverse effects in organisms. OBJECTIVES To present a three-step protocol for identifying suitable biomarkers to assess fish health in coastal and marine ecosystems, using Gladstone Harbour (Australia) as a case study. ...

aquatic environments are often contaminated by various industrial, agricultural and domestic sewage, while different pesticides have markedly different effects on aquatic life. scenedesmus spp. are often used as an indicator to show changes in physico-chemical and environmental conditions of the aquatic ecosystems. this study aimed to investigate the effects of different concentrations of pesti...

The growing need to evaluate the quality of aquatic ecosystems led to the development of numerous monitoring tools. Among them, the development of biomarker-based procedures, that combine precocity and relevance, is recommended. However, multi-biomarker approaches are often hard to interpret, and produce results that are not easy to integrate in the environmental policies framework. Integrative...

The occurrence, distribution, speciation, and biotransformation of arsenic in aquatic environment (marine and freshwater) have been studied extensively by several research groups during last couple of decades. However, most of those studies have been conducted in marine waters, and the results are available in a number of reviews. Speciation, bioaccumulation, and biotransformation of arsenic in...

The relative contributions of procaryotes and eucaryotes to the degradation of the lignin and polysaccharide components of lignocellulosic detritus in two marine and two freshwater wetland ecosystems were determined. Two independent methods-physical separation of bacteria from fungi and other eucaryotes by size fractionation, and antibiotic treatments-were used to estimate procaryotic and eucar...