Colin Janssen - Böcker

These papers are from the "International Symposium on New Microbiotests for Routine Toxicity Screening and Biomonitoring - Development - Applications - Cost-effectiveness" which was organized in June 1998 in Brno, Czech Republic. It comprises 60 original and peer-reviewed papers selected from over 100 oral and poster presentations given during this meeting by scientists from many countries worldwide. It features: overview of microscale bioassays with special emphasis on their application in various domains of environmental contamination; reviews on toxicity testing with microbiotests in a regulatory framework; description and application of microbiotests with lethal and sublethal test criteria, and of their sensitivity in comparison with conventional bioassays; reports on investigations with small-scale toxicity tests on natural waters, wastes, contaminated air, soils and sediments, specific chemicals and biotoxins; application of new microbiotests for mutagenicity and genotoxicity screening; and critical evaluation of the potential of specific microbiotests as alternatives to conventional toxicity tests.

The determination of the hazards resulting from the accidental or deli berate contamination of terrestrial and aquatic environments is in most countries still lirnited to the detection and quantification of the suspected pollutants by chemical analyses. Such an approach is unfortunately hampered by the following constraints : the costs as weil as the technical difficulties of analyzing every individual chemical which may be present in the sampies, and the difficulty of assessing the hazards and risks of environmental contaminations from a set of chemical data. During the last decades the scientific and regulatory community has gradually realized that biological methodologies have to be taken into consideration for an ecologically meaningful assessment of the toxicological hazards of contaminants. Effect evaluations obtained with biological techniques indeed integrate the impact of all the contaminants to which living biota are exposed. Bioassays with selected test species representative for the biological commumtles of the environments under consideration, are now applied more or less regularly to determine toxic and genotoxic effects. Taking into account the species specific and chemical specific character of toxicity to biota, the necessity of a «battery of tests» approach with species of different trophic levels is currently also generally accepted and implemented. It is dear that a balanced partnership between chemical, biological, toxicological and microbiological analyses is always the best strategy for generating the broadest information base on environmental hazards.