Frontiers in Genetics (Jun 2015)
Closing the gap: from public concerns about health effects to science-based testing of chemicals
Abstract
The comet assay is a powerful technology for measuring DNA integrity in humans and other organisms at the level of individual cells. The assay is used for research and industrial testing but suffers from a lack of standardisation, which hinders its use on a larger scale, for example as a diagnostic tool in personalised medicine or as a standard industrial testing approach for assessing toxic effects of chemicals and drugs. A variety of comet assay equipment has been used by different research groups. Most is “homemade”, adapted from other related fields, or provided by commercial companies with no deep scientific understanding of the technology and comet community needs. Our goal is to close the gap between “in house” comet approaches used in a setting of a research lab and the release of modern comet equipment and services, which would combine attractive and functional design with high throughput sample analysis and a high degree of standardisation. European research labs, biomedical and chemical industries, as well as regulators will be among the customers. We have already made and put in use fully functional “in house” high throughput comet prototypes and have shown their scientific advantages over conventional comet technologies. The next step is to transform our homemade technology into a gold standard comet assay - a high throughput, integrated, user-friendly DNA damage testing facility.
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