This document reports on the activities carried out during a four-week visit of Roberto Cavada at the NASA Ames Research Center. The main goal was to test the practical applicability of the framework proposed by Pecheur and Cimatti, where a diagnosability problem is reduced to a Symbolic Model Checking problem.

A number of phthalate esters and related chemicals were tested for mutagenicity in Salmonella typhimurium. The chemicals were tested blind in three laboratories by a preincubation modification of the Ames Salmonella/mammalian microsome test using S-9 prepared from Aroclor-induced rats and Syrian hamsters. All chemicals tested were judged to be nonmutagenic.

David Hessel , Carolyn Lawrence , and Nick Lauter 1,2,3* 1 Interdepartmental Genetics Program, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011, U.S.A. 2 Department of Plant Pathology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011, U.S.A 3 USDA-ARS Corn Insects and Crop Genetics Research, Ames, IA, 50011, U.S.A. 4 Department of Genetics, Development and Cell Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011, U.S....

BACKGROUND Crotalaria pallida Ailton is a plant belonging to the Fabaceae family, popularly known as "rattle or rattlesnake" and used in traditional medicine to treat swelling of the joints and as a vermifuge. Previous pharmacological studies have also reported anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and antifungal activities. Nevertheless, scientific information regarding this species is scarce, and ...

Determination of mutagenic activity in bacterial systems has become accepted as an initial step in the evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of new chemicals. In this paper, a bacterial mutagen screening technique is described in which chemicals can be tested in 10 tester strains over a 10,000-fold concentration gradient both with and without metabolic activation. Using this assay, 855 chemi...

Identifying agents that have long-term deleterious impact on health but exhibit no immediate toxicity is of prime importance. It is well established that long-term toxicity of chemicals could be caused by their ability to generate changes in the DNA sequence through the process of mutagenesis. Several assays including the Ames test and its different modifications were developed to assess the mu...

Fine airborne respirable particulates less than 10 micrometer (PM10) are considered one of the top environmental public health concerns, since they contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are among the major carcinogenic compounds found in urban air. The objective of this study is to assess the genotoxicity of the ambient PM10 collected at 11 urban sites in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. T...

Our research team is developing an agent-based test bed for the integrated study of retail and wholesale power markets operating over transmission and distribution networks with smart-grid functionality. The test bed will seam together two existing test beds, the AMES Wholesale Power Market Test Bed developed by a group of researchers at Iowa State University and the GridLAB-D electric energy d...

Findings of the present study agree with published results that showed an incidence of approximately 25% “false negative” results with the Forrest FPN test for phenothiazine derivatives in urine. A recently published modification purportedly decreased these “false negatives” to less than 5%. However, our control group of negative urine specimens omitted in Campbell’s study, yielded 100% negativ...

A new series of 30 miscellaneous National Toxicology Program chemicals has been evaluated prospectively for carcinogenicity and overt toxicity by COMPACT (Computer Optimised Molecular Parametric Analysis for Chemical Toxicity. CYP1A and CYP2E1). Evaluations were also made by Hazardexpert, and for metal ion redox potentials; and these, together with COMPACT, were compared with results from the A...