Genotoxicity assessment of food ingredients using high-content screening in vitro micronucleus assay

Objective To validate the feasibility of genotoxicity assessment of food ingredients using high-content screening (HCS) in vitro micronucleus (IVMN) assays. Methods Two IVMN methods were used to evaluate the genotoxicity of ten compounds, including five known genotoxic compounds (clastogens and aneugens), one known non-genotoxic compound and four food ingredients. At least three concentrations of each compound and two parallels were set. No serum minimum essential medium (MEM) was treated as negative control.20 μg/ml cyclophosphamide and 1.0 μg/ml mitomycin C was treated as positive controls. With and without metabolic activation, Chinese hamster lung (CHL) cells were treated with ten test compounds for 4 h. And the frequency of micronuclei was analyzed. Results The frequencies of micronuclei, which were obtained by conventional IVMN and HCS IVMN assay, induced by benzo (a) pyrene (dose range from 2.5 to 10 μg/ml), methyl methanesulphonate (dose range from 5 to 20 μg/ml), 4-nitroquinoline-N-oxide (dose range from 0.01 to 0.04 μg/ml), colchicine (dose range from 0.25 to 1.0 μg/ml), and vinblastine sulfate (dose range from 0.5 to 2.0 μg/ml) were significantly different with negative controls (P0.05). Conclusion In this study, the result of HCS IVMN assays were accordance to that of traditional IVMN assay. It was revealed that the genotoxicity assessment of food ingredients using HCS IVMN method was feasible.