Pollution poses serious threats to marine organisms and ecosystem health, highlighting the need for effective methods of ecological risk assessment. Biomarkers offer valuable tools for evaluating the ecotoxicological effects of pollutants on marine organisms. Over the past decades, the application of biomarkers, particularly at molecular levels, in marine pollution monitoring has attracted growing attention. Here, bibliometric analysis of biomarker-based research is conducted to identify the progress in their application for marine pollution monitoring. The advancement of omics technologies provides new tools to identify specific biomarkers to indicate marine pollution through high-throughput approaches. However, the identification of biomarkers that exhibit both high sensitivity and monotonic response from high-throughput data remains a challenge. Dose-response modeling on omics data facilitates the identification of target biomarkers. Moreover, multivariate biomarker indices provide a more comprehensive assessment of biological responses on marine organisms and the comparison of ecosystem health across time and space. This paper systematically examines methodologies for identifying specific, sensitive and monotonic molecular biomarkers, discusses the characteristics of various multivariate biomarker indices, and highlights the current gaps and perspectives of molecular biomarkers in marine pollution monitoring. The aim of this paper is to inspire further research on biomarker-based approaches strategies for advancing marine ecological risk assessment.
Zhan et al. (2026) studied this question.