Rapid Assessment of Genotoxicity by Flow Cytometric Detection of Cell Cycle Alterations

Flow cytometry is a convenient method for the determination of genotoxic effects of environmental pollution and can reveal genotoxic compounds in unknown environmental mixtures. It is especially suitable for the analyses of large numbers of samples during monitoring programs. The speed of detection is one of the advantages of this technique which permits the acquisition of 10⁴-10⁵ cells per sample in 5 min. This method can rapidly detect cell cycle alterations resulting from DNA damage. The outcome of such an analysis is a diagram of DNA content across the cell cycle which indicates cell proliferation, G₂ arrests, G₁ delays, apoptosis, and ploidy.Here, we present the flow cytometric procedure for rapid assessment of genotoxicity via detection of cell cycle alterations. The described protocol simplifies the analysis of genotoxic effects in marine environments and is suitable for monitoring purposes. It uses marine mussel cells in the analysis and can be adapted to investigations on a broad range of marine invertebrates.