Proceedings of the XLV Italian Society of Agricultural Genetics - SIGA Annual Congress

Salsomaggiore Terme, Italy - 26/29 September, 2001

ISBN 88-900622-1-5

Poster Abstract

CA AND SCE ANALYSIS IN IN VITRO BOVINE LYMPHOCYTE CULTURES TREATED WITH THE MYCOTOXIN ZEARALENONE

LIOI M.B., BARBIERI R., SANTORO A.

Dipartimento di Scienze delle Produzioni Animali, Università degli Studi della Basilicata, Potenza

lioi@unibas.it

zearalenone, cattle, chromosome aberrations, sister chromatid exchanges

Zearalenone is a mycotoxin produced by several members of the genus Fusarium that elicits estrogenic effects on mammalian reproductive systems and it has been considered to play a role in infertility and abortions in animals in the first trimester. Evidence of the genotoxicity of zearalenone and of its own effects on the reproductive efficiency of cattle is, at present, still unclear. On the other hand, a limited number of genotoxicity assays have been carried out with zearalenone, and controversial results have been reported. Zearalenone was found to be negative in Salmonella typhimurium assay and in some eukariotic cell mutation assays. However, zearalenone and its estrogenic metabolites showed a positive DNA damaging effects in in vitro recombination tests with Bacillus subtilis and CHO cells. In the present study we investigate the genotoxic potential of the mycotoxin zearalenone in in vitro bovine lymphocyte cultures, using chromosome aberration (CA) and sister chromatid exchange (SCE) as genetic end-points. METHODS. One ml of whole blood from 3 healthy unrelated cows, nearly one year of age, was cultured for 72 h at 37 °C for CA and SCE studies. Increasing concentrations of zearalenone (from 0.1 to 2.0 mM) were added immediately after mitogen stimulation and left throughout the whole culture period. From each concentration and from each subject, 50 well spread metaphases bearing 60 chromosomes were scored on blindly coded slides for structural chromosome aberrations and for SCEs. The comparison between the exposed and control groups was performed applying the Student’s t-test. RESULTS. Results indicated that zearalenone produced a significant increase in the percent of aberrant cells as well as in the frequency of structural chromosome aberrations compared to the controls. SCE frequencies showed a slight increase in the number of SCE/cell compared to the controls. The preliminary results seem to indicate that zearalenone affects mainly the chromosome structure than the DNA repair mechanisms.