During the winter quarter the Department of Environmental Toxicology at the University of California, Davis, has hosted a series of seminar speakers in the area of chemical mutagenesis and carcinogenesis. This newsletter represents a distillation of much of the information presented at the symposium and in some of the seminars this winter. I would like to thank Dr. Dennis Hsieh, Professor of Environmental Toxicology for his assistance with the preparation of this article.
Genetic toxicology is the study of the toxic effects of chemicals on genetic material.
Genetic changes can be classified according to the type of change that occurs to the genetic material. The first type of genetic toxicity is mutation. Mutations occur when a base pair in DNA is deleted, added, or substituted. These mutations are sometimes called point mutations because they affect single units of DNA structure. Slight mutational events may be very difficult to analyze unless the consequences are severe.