[Studies of in vitro and in vivo toxicity of dyes used in affinity chromatography].

Some reactive textile dyes are used for years as biomimetic ligands in protein purification. The reluctance to use these performant systems in large scale for therapeutically applicable proteins is related with the possible dye leakage and consequently with problems of contamination. Therefore, toxicology data are necessary to quantify the level of danger in association with sensitive assays. This study deals with a series of in vitro toxicity studies with eucaryotic cells (growth, polyploidia, ...) as well as with procaryotic cells (E. coli) for genotoxic studies. Both approaches demonstrated a total absence of toxicity for all ranges of concentrations investigated for Reactive Blue 2, Reactive Red 120 and their derivatives. Additional experiments done in vivo by the administration of dye solutions to a series of mice confirmed the non toxic character of these dyes in vitro.