Inactivation and repair of bacteriophage lambda by furfural

Furfural is a dietary mutagen and is present in various frequently consumed food products. In earlier work we have shown that it induces single strand breaks in duplex DNA which occur preferentially in AT base pairs. Experiments on the conservation of EcoRI cleavage site in mutant plasmids further established that repair of furfural damaged plasmid DNA occurs on propagation in the host cells. In this paper it is shown that the strand scissions induced by furfural in DNA account for its biological activity as assayed by inactivation of bacteriophage lambda. Using various repair defective mutants of E. coli we have shown that DNA repair predominantly involves the polA pathway.