Maintenance of physiological levels of intracellular and extracellular calcium is essential for life. Increased intracellular calcium levels are involved in cell death (apoptosis and necrosis) and are associated with positive responses in the Comet assay in vitro. In addition, high calcium and vitamin D intakes were reported to induce apoptosis in adipose tissue in obese mice and to increase DN...

Comet-FISH technique is an extension of commonly used comet assay. Its purpose is to determine whether primary DNA damage which comet assay detects occurred within a sequence of interest that is visualized by hybridization of fluorescent probe. Presence of the signal in comet tail indicates impaired structural integrity of sequence. Our modifications to the original comet-FISH technique describ...

An adaptation of the Comet-assay was developed which enables the discrimination of viable, apoptotic and necrotic single cells by use of the common Annexin-V staining and a dye exclusion test on the cells already embedded in agarose gel on glass slides. Membrane integrity (Ethidium-Homodimer exclusion), cellular esterase activity (Calcein blue-AM) as well as translocation of phosphadidyl-serine...

The aim of this study was to evaluate the genotoxic effects of a crude extract of khat (Catha edulis, Forsk) leaves in rats. Two groups were fed khat crude extract, 1000 and 2000mg/kg body weight, for 90 days and were compared with a control group. The alkaline (pH>13) version of comet assay was used in this study. However, no previous published work has been undertaken and showed the effect of...

The single-cell gel/comet assay is an electrophoretic technique used to detect single-strand breaks in DNA. Damage is assessed examining individual cells under an epifluorescent microscope. UV-induced DNA damage consists mostly of the formation of pyrimidine dimers; therefore, most of the damage cannot be detected using a standard comet assay. The enzyme T4 endonuclease V breaks DNA strands at ...

In recent years the Comet assay (or single cell gel electrophoresis assay) has been established as a rapid and sensitive method for the detection of DNA damage. For early genotoxicity screening of new chemical entities in industrial toxicology, the Comet assay is more and more used for assessment of the DNA damaging potential of a test compound. In order to increase compound screening throughpu...

Sperm DNA damage adversely affects male fertility and contributes to poorer embryo development and lower pregnancy rates. Endogenous hormones are critical to spermatogenesis and maintenance of male reproductive function and likely play an important role in human sperm DNA integrity, but this relationship is not fully understood. The present study measured serum hormone levels and sperm DNA dama...