Advancing environmental toxicology with lipidomics: from toxicity evaluation to mechanistic understanding

Lipidomics has emerged as a powerful analytical approach in environmental toxicology, providing molecular-level insights into how pollutants perturb lipid metabolism and related biological pathways. This review highlights how lipidomic profiling has been applied to evaluate the toxicity of diverse environmental pollutants, including heavy metals, organic contaminants, microplastics, and particulate matter, to identify lipid-based biomarkers, and to elucidate mechanistic pathways underlying adverse biological effects. Lipidomics has revealed pollutant-induced alterations associated with multiple toxicity endpoints, including hepatotoxicity, neurotoxicity, developmental and reproductive toxicity, nephrotoxicity, oxidative stress, immunotoxicity, pulmonary toxicity, and dermal toxicity. Importantly, the integration of lipidomics with other omics technologies, such as transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and microbiomics, has advanced the understanding of toxic mechanisms and offered novel perspectives for toxicological research. Finally, the paper discusses the challenges and outlines future research directions for applying lipidomics in the toxicological investigation of environmental pollutants.