Highly Sensitive Bioassays for Evaluating Airborne Mutagens Indoors

摘要

The standard mutagenicity bioassays that are readily applied to the evaluation ofoutdoor air samples collected by high volume samplers are not sufficiently sensitive to measure the mutagenicity of low volume air samples collected indoors. Two microsuspension mutation assays using various strains of Salmonella typhimurium were evaluated for the assessment of indoor air pollution. One assay used highly sensitive YG strains of bacteria in a histidine reversion assay. The other was a forward mutation assay detecting 8-azaguanine resistant mutants in the TM677 strain. To decrease the required sample mass in the forward mutation assay, the volume in the preincubation step was decreased 10-fold to produce an ultra microsuspension assay. By applying these assays to indoor air samples, their usefulness was confirmed in investigating the effect of smoking, ventilation or air conditioning.