Abstract: Faced with increasingly serious water pollution problems, water quality biotoxicity testing has become an important means of water quality status investigation and water environment safety supervision because it can reflect the toxic effects of pollutants on aquatic organisms in an effect-oriented manner. In view of this, based on the domestic and foreign literature on water quality biotoxicity testing in recent years, the existing water quality biotoxicity testing methods are systematically summarized the toxicity response indicators and toxicity testing principles used in different testing methods combed, the characteristics of different testing methods are compared, and the development status of existing testing methods are analyzed here. At present, water quality biotoxicity detection methods based on different tested organisms (fish, fleas, luminescent fungi, algae) have been widely used in toxicity analysis of typical environmental pollutants such as heavy metals and pesticides, and in actual water body toxicity detection and evaluation. In the future, developing a multi-indicator water quality biotoxicity detection and evaluation method based on multi-level aquatic organisms, establishing a new comprehensive characterization and evaluation method of water quality toxicity that integrates the apparent toxicity and potential toxicity of water bodies, and corresponding toxicity grading standards will be the key development points and difficulties of water quality biological toxicity detection research direction. The BRIEF REPORT is available for this paper at http://www.ykcs.ac.cn/en/article/doi/10.15898/j.ykcs.202412110256.