Evaluation of 4,4'-diaminodiphenyl ether in the rat comet assay: Part of the Japanese Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods (JaCVAM)-initiative international validation study of in vivo rat alkaline comet assay.

As a part of the Japanese Center for the Validation of Alternative Methods (JaCVAM)-initiative international validation study of the in vivo rat alkaline comet assay, 4,4'-diaminodiphenyl ether (DPE), a known rodent genotoxic carcinogen, was tested in this laboratory. Sprague Dawley rats (7-9 weeks of age) were given three oral doses of DPE, 24 and 21 h apart and liver or stomach sampled 3h after the final dose. Under the conditions of the test, no increases in DNA damage in liver and stomach were observed with DPE (up to 200 mg/kg/day).

A comparative performance test of standard, medium- and high-throughput comet assays.

A serious limitation of the conventional comet assay (single cell gel electrophoresis) is the restriction on the number of samples that can be processed in one experiment, imposed by the size of the electrophoresis platform. One approach to increasing throughput is to reduce the size of gels. We here compare the conventional system of two large gels on a microscope slide, with two recent developments, namely 12 minigels per slide, and a format with 96 minigels on GelBond® film.