title: Development and progress for three decades inumutest systems.
abstract: Umutest have been widely used to predict the detection and assessment of DNA- damaging chemicals in environmental genotoxicity field for three decades. This test system is more useful with respect to simplicity, sensitivity, rapidity, and reproducibility. A review of the literature on the development of theumutest is presented in this article. The contents of this article are included a description of numerous data using theumutest. This test have been fully evaluated and used in many directions. Different genetically engineeredumusystems introducing bacterial and rat or human drug metabolizing enzymes into theumutester strains, have been successfully established and are considered as useful tools for genotoxicity assays to study the mechanisms of biotransformation in chemical carcinogenesis. Actually, we developed that two types of bacterial metabolizing enzymes and 4 types of rat and human metabolizing enzyme DNAs are expressed in these strains such as nitroreductase andO-acetyltransferase, cytochrome P450,N-acetyltransferases, sulfotransferases, and glutathioneS-transferases, respectively. Due to increasing numbers of minute environmental samples and new pharmaceuticals, a high-throughputumutest system usingSalmonella typhimuriumTA1535/pSK1002, NM2009, and NM3009 strains provides a useful for these genotoxicity screening. I also briefly describe the first attempts to incorporate suchumutester strain into photo-genotoxicity test.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Life and Environmental Sciences, Osaka Shin-Ai College, 6-2-28 Tsurumi, Tsurumi-ku, Osaka 538-0053 Japan.
authors.forename: Yoshimitsu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Oda
keywords: Cytochrome P450; Genotoxicity; Glutathione S-transferase; Metabolic activation; O-acetyltransferase; SOS response; Sulfotransferase; umu test