REVIEW ARTICLE


Pollution Biomarkers in Environmental and Human Biomonitoring



Maria G. Lionetto*, Roberto Caricato, Maria E. Giordano
Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies, University of Salento, Via prov.le Lecce-Monteroni, 73100 Lecce - Italy


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Creative Commons License
© 2019 Lionetto et al.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies, University of Salento, via prov.le Lecce-Monteroni, 73100 Lecce - Italy; Tel: +39 0832 298694; Fax: +39 0832 298626; E-mail: giulia.lionetto@unisalento.it


Abstract

Environmental pollutants generate harmful conditions for living organisms, including humans. This accounts for the growing interest to early warning tools for detection of adverse biological responses to pollutants in both humans and wildlife. Molecular and cellular biomarkers of pollution meet this requirement. A pollution biomarker is defined as an alteration in a biological response occurring at molecular, cellular or physiological levels which can be related to exposure to or toxic effects of environmental chemicals.

Pollution biomarkers have known a growing development in human and environmental biomonitoring representing a valuable tool for early pollutant exposure detection or early effect assessment (exposure/effect biomarkers).

The review discusses the recent developments in the use of pollution biomarker in human and environmental biomonitoring and analyzes future perspectives in the application of this tool such as their potentiality for bridging human and environmental issued studies.

Keywords: Environmental pollutants, Cellular biomarkers, Pollution biomarker, Environmental biomonitoring, Molecular, Physiological.