1. Genotoxicity and Mutagenicity
- Author
-
Lucas Buruaem Moreira and Denis Abessa
- Subjects
chemistry.chemical_classification ,Chemical compound ,Chemistry ,Somatic cell ,medicine.disease_cause ,Germline ,chemistry.chemical_compound ,Enzyme ,Biochemistry ,medicine ,Xenobiotic ,Genotoxicity ,DNA ,Nucleotide excision repair - Abstract
Environmental damages or disturbances to genetic material are studied under the scope of several areas, such as toxicology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics. These chemical or physical injuries on the DNA structure can promote changes and damages that are evaluated by genotoxic studies. Genotoxicity is the harmful action of a xenobiotic agent (chemical or physical) on DNA resulting in genetic mutation. This harm may result in tumors (somatic cells) or be transmitted from generation to generation (germline cells), affecting future generations developing diseases or malformations. The results of damaging activities of these chemical agents range from single and double-strand breaks, cross-linking between DNA bases or between DNA bases and proteins, and formation of DNA adducts when a chemical compound is covalently linked to DNA (Preston and Hoffmann 2001). Contaminants may give rise to chain breaks in four different ways —direct binding of genotoxic compounds; through the effects of oxygen radicals; as a result of interaction with reactive metabolites; and as a consequence of enzymatic action of excision repair mechanism (Eastman and Barry 1992; Speit and Hartmann 1999). The damages described above
- Published
- 2016