Abstract
Pesticide residues with genotoxic potential reach the aquatic environment and constitute a major issue that give rise to concerns at local, regional, national and global scales. Fish serves as an excellent genetic model for the genetic hazard assessment as they are very sensitive to changes in their environment. As there is a close consortium of DNA damage, mutation and induction of various types of genetic disorders, genotoxicity tests like chromosomal aberration test, micronuclei and comet assay are gaining credence and since past few decades many tests have been developed for evaluating genetic alterations in aquatic organisms. These tests rely on the premise that any change to DNA may have enduring and ardent consequences. Thus, the first aim of the genotoxicology is to describe the outcome produced by toxic substances in various test species, but only from the genetic point of view and to draw conclusions that can be extrapolated to man. This review summarizes the genotoxicity tests developed till date and the role of piscine model in genotoxicology. The text also delves the latest knowledge and thinking on these cardinal approaches for the assessment of aquatic environmental health, management and conservation, besides providing useful repository for the researchers especially dealing with aquatic genotoxicity tests. The perspectives for further research on the use of genotoxicology tests were also highlighted.
Highlights
The demand for a clean and immune supply of water for drinking, agriculture and recreation has accrued since the last few decades
Fish serves as useful genetic model for the assessment of pollution in aquatic ecosystems [75]
The studies reviewed here clearly demonstrate that environmental genotoxicology holds the key to early detection and monitoring of genotoxins in aquatic environments, when piscine model in taken into consideration
Summary
The demand for a clean and immune supply of water for drinking, agriculture and recreation has accrued since the last few decades. It is clear that progress in any field of research depends primarily on the development of its methodology In this context, recent advances in the development of techniques and diagnostic tools have certainly enhanced the understanding of how an organism interacts with its environment at individual, cellular and molecular level, and substantial progress has been made to assess the genotoxin induced genetic damage in the aquatic biota [3]. One role is the implementation of mutagenicity testing and risk assessment methods to evaluate the impact of genotoxic agents found in the environment, of those whose presence may alter the integrity of gene pool. The popular Web based resources are TOXNET, GENE-TOX, TOXLINE, MEDLINE, PUBMED, Gateway, Entrez, Hazardous Substances Data Bank, CHEMIDPLUS at NLM, etc., As the molecular biology and computational tools improve, new areas such as structural activity relationship analysis, mutational spectra databases and toxicogenomics, which are the emerging areas within genotoxicology, have online resources as well [17]
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