BACKGROUND Water disinfection by-products have been associated with an increased cancer risk. Micronuclei (MN) frequency in lymphocytes is a marker of genomic damage and can predict adult cancer risk. OBJECTIVE We evaluated maternal exposure to drinking water brominated trihalomethanes (BTHM) in relation to MN frequency in maternal and cord blood lymphocytes. METHODS MN frequency was examin...

Arsenite is known to induce chromosomal damage and extracellular signal-regulated kinases 1/2 (ERK) signaling transduction pathway. Arsenite also perturbs mitotic spindle and induces G2/M prolongation, leading to genomic instability. However, little is known concerning whether G1 phase is susceptible to arsenite in causing genomic instability and ERK activation. In this study, we investigate th...

Overexpression of the low molecular weight isoforms (LMW-E) of cyclin E induces chromosome instability; however, the degree to which these tumor-specific forms cause genomic instability differs from that of full-length cyclin E (EL), and the underlying mechanism(s) has yet to be elucidated. Here, we show that EL and LMW-E overexpression impairs the G(2)-M transition differently and leads to dif...

Molecular cytogenetic methods were applied to investigate the effect of the occupational exposure to low concentrations of benzene and petroleum fuels on genomic stability. Twelve male gasoline station attendants (average benzene exposure of 0.32 mg/m3 as 8h TWA) and 12 age- and smoking-matched unexposed controls were selected for the study. The incidence of hyperploidy and polyploidy in periph...

It was recently reported that human umbilical endothelial vein cells (HUVECs) transdifferentiate and express cardiac genes when co-cultured with rat neonatal cardiomyocytes (Condorelli et al. (2001)). If substantiated and optimized, this phenomenon could have many therapeutic applications. We re-investigated the HUVEC-rat neonatal cardiomyocyte co-culture system but detected cardiomyocyte marke...

We investigated the effect of deoxycorticosterone-salt hypertension and its reversal on nuclear ploidy in rat aortic smooth muscle cells, using flow cytometry. Systolic blood pressure and the percentage of cells with tetraploid nuclei increased over a 4-week period and then remained constant. In control rats 6.0 +/- 0.6% of aortic cells had tetraploid nuclei, and this increased to 27.0 +/- 1.1 ...

Male Wistar rats were exposed to radon and its progeny (0.0, 60, 262 and 564 working level months, WLM), and the frequency of micronuclei was determined in deep lung fibroblasts, and deep lung, trachea and nasal epithelial cells with slopes of 0.28, 0.67, 0.34 and 0.11 micronuclei/1000 binucleated cells/WLM respectively. Micronuclei in deep lung fibroblasts, isolated and cultured using two meth...

The generation of new myocytes is an essential process of in utero heart growth. Most, or all, cardiac myocytes lose their capacity for proliferation during the perinatal period through the process of terminal differentiation. An increasing number of studies focus on how experimental interventions affect cardiac myocyte growth in the fetal sheep. Nevertheless, fundamental questions about normal...

objective: critical macromolecules such as dna maybe damaged by free radicals that are generated from the interaction of ionizing radiation with biological systems. melatonin and vitamin c have been shown to be direct free radical scavengers. the aim of this study was to investigate the in vivo/in vitro radioprotective effects of melatonin and vitamin c separately and combined against genotoxic...