Molecular biomarkers

The new tool in medical and environmental biotechnology

Abstract

Currently, scientific knowledge and technological advances provide us with detailed information on the relationship between environmental factors and their effects on biological processes. Occasionally this relationship has a negative impact on the health of organisms; using this knowledge, molecular methods of diagnosis and identification of diseases or ecological alterations have begun to be developed, which are recorded by means of changes in the condition of the organisms evaluated. Such changes can be as obvious as the death of individuals in a population or very subtle, such as changes in the concentration or activity of biomolecules such as enzymatic or stress response proteins, changes in DNA structure and the activity of regulatory genes. These biological evidences at the molecular level can be considered as molecular biomarkers.