Genotoxic analysis of silver nanoparticles in Drosophila

Abstract

Health risk assessment of nanomaterials is an emergent field, genotoxicity being an important endpoint to be tested. Since in vivo studies offer many advantages, such as the study of the bioavailability of nanomaterials to sensitive target cells, we propose Drosophila as a useful model for the study of the toxic and genotoxic risks associated with nanoparticle exposure. In this work we have carried out a genotoxic evaluation of silver nanoparticles in Drosophila by using the wing somatic mutation and recombination test. This test is based on the principle that loss of heterozygosis and the corresponding expression of the suitable recessive markers, multiple wing hairs and flare-3, can lead to the formation of mutant clones in larval cells, which are expressed as mutant spots on the wings of adult flies. Silver nanoparticles were supplied to third instar larvae at concentrations ranging from 0.1–10 mM. The results showed that small but significant increases in the frequency of total spots were observed, thus indicating that silver nanoparticles were able to induce genotoxic activity in the wing spot assay of D. melanogaster, mainly via the induction of somatic recombination. These positive results obtained with silver nanoparticles contrast with the negative findings obtained when silver nitrate was tested.

Keywords::

• Genotoxicity
• silver nanoparticles
• Drosophila melanogaster
• wing spot assay
• somatic recombination

Acknowledgments

Eşref Demir is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Akdeniz University and the Council of Higher Education (YÖK), Ankara (Turkey).

Declaration of interest: This investigation has been supported in part by the Generalitat de Catalunya (CIRIT, 2009SGR-725) and by the Management Unit of Research Projects of Akdeniz University (Project ID: 2009.03.0121.004), Antalya, Turkey. The authors report no conflict of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.