1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Materials and methods 3.1. Main reagents and cell culture 3.2. MTT assay 3.3. Comet assay 3.4. Cell cycle analysis by flow cytometry 3.5. The Caspase-3 colorimetric activity assay 3.6. Statistical analysis 4. Results 4.1. MTT assay 4.2. Comet assay 4.3. FCM assay the distribution of cell cycle and cell apoptosis 4.4. The expression of Caspase-3 5. Discussion 6. Ac...

Meteor showers on the Earth occur at well known times, and are associated with the decay of comets or other minor bodies whose orbital paths pass close to the Earth’s trajectory. On the surface, determining the closest proximity of two orbital paths appears to be a computationally intensive procedure. This paper describes a simple geometric method for determining the proximity between the orbit...

Dose- and time-response curves were combined to assess the potential of the comet assay in radiation biodosimetry. The neutral comet assay was used to detect DNA double-strand breaks in lymphocytes caused by γ-ray irradiation. A clear dose-response relationship with DNA double-strand breaks using the comet assay was found at different times after irradiation (p < 0.001). A time-response relatio...

The comet assay can distinguish small differences in DNA damage between different samples of cells, implying that statistical tests are important to assess whether this occurs by chance. Excellent scholarly papers with concise descriptions of statistical analysis and recommendations for tests have been published (Lovell et al., 1999; Lovell and Omori, 2008). We often come across publications th...

Organisms in polluted areas can be exposed to complex mixtures of chemicals; however, exposure to genotoxic contaminants can be particularly devastating. DNA damage can lead to necrosis, apoptosis, or heritable mutations, and therefore has the potential to impact populations as well as individuals. Single cell gel electrophoresis (the comet assay) is a simple and sensitive technique used to exa...

The comet assay (single-cell gel electrophoresis) has been established as a simple, rapid, flexible and sensitive method of detecting DNA damage in single cells(1,2). Cells embedded in agarose on a microscope slide are lysed with detergent. Electrophoresis at high pH results in structures resembling comets, observed by fluorescence microscopy; the intensity of the comet tail relative to the hea...

Cometary particles returned by the Stardust Discovery Mission are primarily silicate materials of solar system origin. Some of the grains were formed at high temperatures close to the Sun, but then transported far out to the Kuiper belt region of the solar system before being incorporated in the comet.

Single cell gel electrophoresis (the comet assay), continues to gain popularity as a means of assessing DNA damage. However, the assay's low sample throughput and laborious sample workup procedure are limiting factors to its application. "Scoring", or individually determining DNA damage levels in 50 cells per treatment, is time-consuming, but with the advent of high-throughput scoring, the limi...

The nucleus of comet C/1996 J1, whose duplicity was first detected in early May 1997, ∼ 4 months after perihelion, is found to have split nontidally∼ 70 days before perihelion at 1.65 AU from the Sun. The secondary nucleus, discovered when in outburst and subsequently observed for 8 2 months, had separated from the primary nucleus at a rate of 1.7 m/s and drifted away from it with a radial nong...