Making Waves: Advancing environmental risk assessment through the quantification of marine microbial sensitivity...

Microbial communities play a vital role in maintaining marine ecosystem health, yet they remain largely excluded from environmental risk assessments and water quality guideline development. Traditional ecotoxicological and regulatory frameworks predominantly rely on single-species toxicity data from eukaryotes, overlooking microbial responses to environmental stressors. However, microbial communities often respond rapidly to environmental change and can serve as sensitive early indicators of ecological disturbance. Advances in high-throughput sequencing and bioinformatics enable comprehensive assessment of microbial responses across multiple levels of biological organisation. Despite these capabilities, standardised methodologies for deriving quantitative microbial sensitivity thresholds remain lacking. This paper synthesises recent progress and emerging approaches in microbial ecotoxicology to support the incorporation of microbial endpoints into environmental regulatory frameworks. We highlight the potential of combining 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing of viable cells with microbial load quantification and advanced Bayesian concentration-response modelling to resolve microbial stress responses and quantify sensitivity thresholds at both community and taxon levels. These thresholds can inform cumulative prokaryotic sensitivity distributions, enabling the derivation of guideline values for microbiomes in alignment with existing approaches used for eukaryotic species. Establishing robust microbial sensitivity thresholds represents a critical step toward incorporating prokaryotes into environmental quality guidelines, improving ecological realism, and enabling earlier, more holistic detection of ecosystem degradation.