From Microbial Ecology to Microbial Ecotoxicology

Because of their ubiquity, abundance and metabolic activities, microorganisms play a crucial role in the biogeochemical cycling of elements in the environment. Any perturbations in the activity and diversity of the microbial community are likely to lead to significant impacts in terms not only of biogeochemical cycling but also ecosystem resilience. Human activities and industrialization have resulted in the release of millions of tonnes of chemicals and pollutants into the environments; some of these are toxic to living organisms. However there is a lack of information about the toxicity effects at the ecosystem level; where toxicity tests have been included in studies the basis has been the use of target species including plants (e.g. radish germination), worms (e.g. earthworm survival) and microbes (e.g. the Microtox bioassay test) to evaluate the effect of the pollutant on the target organisms. Microbial ecotoxicology represents an emerging discipline that encompasses microbial ecology, microbial toxicology, chemistry and physics and that offers great potential in the assessment of the fate and impact of environmental pollutants at the ecosystem level. In this introduction we discuss the importance of microbial ecology together with some of the advantages of the application of the recently established microbial ecotoxicology discipline in order to reliably assess the impact of contamination on the resilience and the functionality of the microbial community.