The role of proteomics in the study of the influence of climate change on seafood products

Abstract

The climatechangeinfluence over the oceans has been the subject of numerous articles informs and strategies from different scientific perspectives, focused mainly in the ecological impact. The majority of the related studies have been focused in measuring or predicting the physical, chemical, geographical, sociological and economical consequences of this reality, which seems to be unstoppable, and only a few of them are devoted to detect the effects of the climatechange over the quality of seafood products, wild or cultivated.

The stress produced in marine organisms by the consequences of climatechange is reflected at the cell molecular level, being affected the metabolite concentration, the expression of proteins and their modifications. The study of the climatechange may take advantage of these molecular changes, which may be used as a source of possible biomarkers of its evolution.

After the genomic age, proteomics appears as a young but robust discipline for a global study of the protein content in cells, including their identification, possible modifications, quantification of differential expression and tissue localization, being the most adequate set of methodologies to evidence protein changes in marine organisms affected by climate variations. In the last decade proteomic technologies have experienced an exponential development, but the research has been mainly applied to biomedical and human health research, being scarcely focused to the study of the marine environment. The application of the proteomics methods to study the effects of climatechange over seafood, mainly from the safety point of view, is reviewed