Toxicogenomics for water quality assessment

Water streams receive a huge amount of wastes from different sectors including urban areas, industrial and agricultural activities. Hence, water bodies will be contaminated with complex, ill-defined mixtures of chemicals and most water organisms will be exposed, to varying degrees, to this contamination. In this context, chemical analysis of water is not sufficient to assess their toxic potential for wildlife and humans. This is because the bioavailability, the biological activities, and interactions between different environmental chemicals are not completely understood and considered when hazard assessments and predictions of possible ecotoxicological effects are made based on concentrations alone. Therefore, a simultaneous application of bioassays is a good complement to chemical analyses and a useful tool to establish the ecological effects to environment, as it provides the complete response of test organisms to all the compounds in the water..Among the methods available to assess the many possible toxic effects caused by the chemicals present in the environment, the analysis of DNA alterations in aquatic organisms has been shown to be a highly suitable method for evaluating the genotoxic contamination of environments, being able to detect toxicity at low concentrations of contaminants in a wide range of species. The pollution-induced genetic damage might cause adverse effects to species and affect the stability of ecosystems. In this mini review we focused our attention on the relevance of different biological assay techniques on genotoxic potential and water quality assessment.