NEWS

For the first time, researchers in India have found that mice and rats exposed to endosulphan suffer from DNA damage and genomic instability, and impaired DNA damage response. The results published on August 4 in the journal, Carcinogenesis, by a team of researchers led by Prof. Sathees Raghavan from the Department of Biochemistry, IISc, Bengaluru show that endosulfan — an organochlorine pesticide — induces breaks in DNA strands and disturbs the damage response mechanism found in cells thus leading to compromised DNA strand repair. The team found mice and rats exposed to endosulfan generated reactive oxygen species, a potent DNA damaging agent. The reactive oxygen species, in turn, caused DNA damage in the form of breaks in DNA strands. The broken DNA strands generally tend to repair themselves by rejoining. But endosulfan treatment was found to cause “extensive processing of broken DNA” leading to increased and long deletion in the strands.

Read More at : http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/energy-and-environment/endosulfan-causes-dna-damage-in-animals-study/article8953544.ece