In natural waters, chemical pollutants do not act independently but often affect aquatic organisms in complex mixtures or in combination with other environmental stresses. These combinations of different stresses and chemicals strongly increase the complexity for toxicity tests and environmental risk assessment. For this reason we use accurate and informative chemical and bioanalytical tools (transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics), to address the complex interaction of chemicals and biological systems under different environmental conditions. The goal is a better understanding of the cellular stress response, for an improve model prediction of fate and effect of chemicals and other stressors, ultimately leading to better risk assessment.
