Assessment of genetic damage and mutagenic properties of chlorpyrifos and glyphosate.

Abstract

Introduction and objective: Beyond acute and chronic poisoning, scientific attention in recent years has shifted toward the negative effects of pesticides on genetic material. Numerous studies demonstrate that these compounds possess both genotoxic and mutagenic potential. Therefore, the aim of this study is to investigate and compare the potential of chlorpyrifos (CPS) and glyphosate (GLY) to induce DNA damage.

Material and methods: Human immortalized keratinocytes cell line HaCaT were used as the test organisms in viability (Neutral Red assay) and genotoxicity assays (Comet assay). To test the mutagenicity, S. typhimurium strains TA98 and TA100 assay was used in microplate format.

Results: The study demonstrated that CPS exhibits significantly higher toxicity and genotoxicity, compared to GLY. The Ames test showed that CPS possesses mutagenic potential (strain TA98) only after activation with the S9 fraction, remaining inactive against strain TA100. Although GLY did not induce mutations in strain TA98, at the highest concentration (1,000 μM), it caused substitution mutations (strain TA100).

Conclusions: Due to the complexity of pesticide biotransformation mechanisms and their diverse impact on genetic material, relying on a single test system is insufficient. To obtain a reliable safety assessment and capture the full spectrum of potential damage, it is necessary to combine bacterial methods, with cytogenetic studies on mammalian cells. Such a complementary approach eliminates errors resulting from the high cytotoxicity of pesticides toward bacteria, and enables the analysis of DNA mutations in non-bacterial models. Further research into the impact of these compounds on the genetic material of living organisms is therefore necessary, but using a greater number of biological models, as well as other methods to resolve this issue.