الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract Rapid lifestyle, especially among people living in urban areas, has led to increasing reliance on the processed food market. Harmful effects caused by the excessive use of food additives used in such type of industry are often neglected; among these are hypersensitivity, allergic reactions, genotoxicity, mutagenicity and more. This proposal investigates genotoxic effects of two commonly used food preservatives; sodium benzoate and potassium nitrate using the somatic mutation and recombination test (SMART) and comet assay. Two important end points of genotoxicity can be covered by in vivo assay systems; comet assay detects DNA damage, while the Drosophila transgenic animal model recognizes gene mutation and/or chromosomal aberrations. Both of the tested compounds showed significantly high levels of tumor induction and frequency compared to a negative control in SMART assay accompanied with a significant amount of DNA damage detected by the comet assay indicating their high potential of being genotoxic materials. The proposal also investigates the in vitro cytotoxic and apoptotic effects of the two food preservatives. The effect of these two preservatives on cell viability was tested on two different cell lines; normal liver cell line THLE2 and human hepatocellular carcinoma cancer cell line HepG2 using MTT assay |