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. 1991 Jan;90:111–116. doi: 10.1289/ehp.90-1519488

Carcinogen adducts as an indicator for the public health risks of consuming carcinogen-exposed fish and shellfish.

B P Dunn 1
PMCID: PMC1519488  PMID: 2050048

Abstract

A large variety of environmental carcinogens are metabolically activated to electrophilic metabolites that can bind to nucleic acids and protein, forming covalent adducts. The formation of DNA-carcinogen adducts is thought to be a necessary step in the action of most carcinogens. Recently, a variety of new fluorescence, immunochemical, and radioactive-postlabeling procedures have been developed that allow the sensitive measurement of DNA-carcinogen adducts in organisms exposed to environmental carcinogens. In some cases, similar procedures have been developed for protein-carcinogen adducts. In an organism with active metabolic systems for a given carcinogen, adducts are generally much longer lived than the carcinogens that formed them. Thus, the detection of DNA- or protein-carcinogen adducts in aquatic foodstuffs can act as an indicator of prior carcinogen exposure. The presence of DNA adducts would, in addition, suggest a mutagenic/carcinogenic risk to the aquatic organism itself. Vertebrate fish are characterized by high levels of carcinogen metabolism, low body burdens of carcinogen, the formation of carcinogen-macromolecule adducts, and the occurrence of pollution-related tumors. Shellfish, on the other hand, have low levels of carcinogen metabolism, high body burdens of carcinogen, and have little or no evidence of carcinogen-macromolecule adducts or tumors. The consumption of carcinogen adducts in aquatic foodstuffs is unlikely to represent a human health hazard. There are no metabolic pathways by which protein-carcinogen or DNA-carcinogen adducts could reform carcinogens. Incorporation via salvage pathways of preformed nucleoside-carcinogen adducts from foodstuffs into newly synthesized human DNA is theoretically possible.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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