Molecular diagnosis of pollution impact in earthworms - Towards integratedbiomonitoring

The present work seeks to develop a methodology, which will allow the evalu ation of novel molecular biomarkers as indicators of sub-lethal responses t o pollution complementing established OECD and US-EPA ecotoxicology test wh ich really heavily on measurement of life-cycle parameters. Furthermore, th e mechanistic relationship between these genetic biomarkers and established indices, which operate at the whole organism level, are also discussed. Li mited application of this groundbreaking technology has been used to monito r the upregulation of three molecular biomarkers (metallothionein, lysosoma l glycoprotein and the large mitochondrial ribosomal subunit) within worms resident to metalliferous soils and exposed to artificial soil supplemented with Cd. These molecular responses can be related to detoxification, cellu lar damage and energy requirements, respectively. The methodology described in this paper allows genetic measurements to be performed in a realistic t ime period with large numbers of samples thus providing a robust, routine, reliable, sensitive and cheap means of assaying molecular biomarkers in an ecologically relevant context.