Detection of ultra-low levels of DNA changes by drinking water: epidemiologically important finding. - GreenMedInfo Summary
Detection of ultra-low levels of DNA changes by drinking water: epidemiologically important finding.
J Biochem. 2014 Nov 17. Epub 2014 Nov 17. PMID: 25406322
Parmila Kumari
The safety of drinking water is essential to our health. In this context, the mutagenicity of water needs to be checked strictly. However, from the methodological limit, the lower concentration (less than ppm) of mutagenicity could not be detected, though there have been of interest in the effect of less concentration mutagens. Here we describe a highly sensitive mutation assay that detects mutagens at the ppb level, termed GPMA (Genome Profiling-based Mutation Assay). This consists of two steps; i) E. coli culture in the medium with/without mutagens and ii) Genome profiling (GP) method (an integrated method of random PCR, temperature gradient gel electrophoresis (TGGE), and computer-aided normalization). Owing to high sensitivity of this method, very low concentration of mutagens in tap water could be directly detected without introducing burdensome concentration processes, enabling rapid measurement of low concentration samples. Less expectedly, all of the tap waters tested (22 samples) were shown to be significantly mutagenic while mineral waters were not. Resultantly, this paper informs two facts that the GPMA method is competent to measure the mutagenicity of waters directly and the experimental results supported the former reports that the city tap waters contain very low level of mutagenicity reagent trihalomethanes.