Mutagenic Effects of Selected Toxicants Found in Wisconsin’s Ground Water

Introduction: The purpose of this project was to continue to test the mutagenic effects of herbicides and pesticides by adding different concentrations of these compounds to human lymphocyte cultures, and scoring for chromosome damage in treated compared to control cultures. It was also an important objective to test the results of different combinations of pesticides and herbicides to check for possible interactive effects in production of chromosome damage. The final goal of this research was to be able to relate these in vitro results to what could be expected from comparable in vivo exposures; only by performing parallel animal experiments and comparing the results to the in vitro studies will it be possible to develop a model which will enable extrapolation of data from short term in vitro studies to enable human risk assessment. Therefore, mouse experiments were initiated in the Spring of 1989 in which mice were chronically exposed via their drinking water to atrazine with and without linuron. The final results are presented here.