An Improved in Vitro Micronucleus Assay to Biological Dosimetry

The biological dosimetry is widely used to estimate the absorbed dose in people occupationally or accidentally exposed to the radiation for a better medical treatment, minimizing the harmful effects. Many techniques and methods have been proposed to detect and quantify the radioinduced lesions in genetic material, among them, the micronucleus (MN) assay. In the present study, we proposed an improved in vitro micronucleus technique that is rapid, sensitive and with minor cell manipulations. Assays were carried out with human tumor cells (MCF-7) seeded (3x10 cells) in slides placed into Petri dishes. Adherent cells were maintained with RPMI medium, supplemented with fetal calf serum, 1 % antibiotics, cytochalasin B (2 μg/mL), and incubated at 37C in the presence of 5% CO2 for 72h. Cells were pre-treated for 24h with aminoguanidine, a nitric oxide synthase inhibitor. Nitric oxide is an intracellular free-radical, involved in DNA double-strand break repair mechanisms. After incubation, adherent cells on slides were briefly fixed with paraformaldehyde and stained with acridine orange (100 μg/mL) for analysis through fluorescence microscopy. Dye fluorescence permitted accurate discrimination between nuclei and micronuclei (bright green) and cytoplasm (red), and made possible a faster counting of binucleated cells. Aminoguanidine (2 mM) induced significant increase (p< 0.05) in frequencies of binucleated cells with micronuclei and in the number of micronuclei per binucleated cell. Data showed that proposed modifications permit to understand an early aspect of NO inhibition and suggested an improved protocol to MN assays.