Application of the yeast comet assay in testing some food additives for genotoxicity by comet assay in yeast

Abstract

Food additives of various types are frequently used in the food sector. Their use is justified by the need to preserve, color, or sweeten a variety of foods. Despite the fact that some additives have been demonstrated to be cytotoxic, they are nevertheless utilized in practice. The effects of monosodium glutamate (MSG), sodium benzoate (SB), and saffron on several yeast haploid knockout strains were studied in this study (YKO). We used the Comet test method to find the optimum amounts at which this set of dietary additives could cause DNA damage. Three regularly used dietary additives were found to efficiently damage DNA. We also evaluated the sensitivity of higher eukaryotic cells to the genotoxic effects of these chemicals with yeast. The comet assay exhibited a better sensitivity of yeast cells, which was undeniably confirmed. The genotypes of haploid (knockout) yeast strains were chosen based on the (Clustal Omega Multiple Sequence Alignment EMBL-EBI) alignment of human and yeast gene sequence homology.