Environmental Biomarkers
Environmental Biomarkers is a Laboratory Initiative at PNNL. Initiatives are investments by the Laboratory in new capabilities that address science-based challenges in the nation's energy, environmental, and security areas.
Our Vision
PNNL will lead the transformation of environmental and threat assessment into a predictive science for managing risk, through integrative research on complex biological systems and their biosignatures.
Our Mission
Our mission is to advance the current scientific understanding and create technological breakthroughs to better predict early organism and ecosystem damage based upon biomolecular response to environmental stressors.
Our Approach
PNNL is using an integrative research approach that combines genomic, proteomic, metabonomics and lipid data for controlled and stressed conditions to discern recognizable and reproducible patterns, i.e., biosignature. Analytical chemistry, computational statistics, and biology tools are needed to identify and extract the biosignature, which is the surrogate for the biological pathway that is being up- or down- regulated as cells or organisms respond to exposures associated with an environmental stressor. Discovery of these biosignatures using this integrative approach is the first step and the distinctive approach being developed by PNNL. The biosignature combined with knowledge of the biological system, will be used to downselect to a fewer number of biomolecules that comprise the biomarker.
Our approach is iterative, involving goals in:
- the identification of biosignatures of response
- the selection and validation of biomarkers
- the development of tools based on these biomarkers for collecting information on the status of an organism or ecosystem
- the use of these tools in surveillance and detection
- the application of this information in predictive models.
Environmental biomarkers will most certainly be central to the next generation of risk assessment tools, augmenting measures of whole-organism response with direct, highly sensitive measures of sub-cellular responses from first exposure through terminal disease state.
