Rapid progress in the field of genomics (the study of how an individual's entire genetic make-up, the genome, translates into biological functions) is beginning to provide tools that may assist our understanding of how chemicals can impact on human and ecosystem health. In many ways, if scientific and regulatory efforts in the 20th century have sought to establish which chemicals cause damage t...

The contributions to this special issue of Mutagenesis have been selected to cover the main research areas served by the comet assay, namely genotoxicology, environmental toxicology, human biomonitoring and fundamental investigations into mechanisms of DNA damage and repair. Innovative methods are described, technical issues are explored, and guidelines are given for venturing into relatively n...

The Windermere humic aqueous model (WHAM) initially designed to model metal cation binding on humic substances were applied in predictive ecotoxicology [2]. For terrestrial higher plants, a recent investigation showed that WHAM was able to satisfactorily model cadmium (Cd), nickel (Ni), and zinc (Zn) concentrations in pea (Pisum sativum L.) roots, but that it overestimated the Cu concentration ...

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has set widely used guidelines that are as a standardized approach assessing toxicity in number of species. Given various studies use different experimental setups, it is difficult to compare findings across them result the lack universally setup nano-ecotoxicology. For freshwater species, Daphnia magna, commonly filter feeding c...

The ICEBAMO meetings aim to facilitate interdisciplinary discussion on environmental and biological aspects of main-group organometals. Previous meetings in Padua (1986 and 1991) and Bordeaux (1994) have brought together researchers from the fields of toxicology, environmental sciences, analytical chemistry, biochemistry, and synthetic organometallic chemistry. ICEBAMO 98 in Odense will provide...