Date of Award
Spring 2005
Document Type
Legacy Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (BS)
Department
Biology
College
College of Science
First Advisor
Stephen P. Bush
Abstract/Description
Genotoxins are chemical compounds that cause damage to deoxyribonucleic acid. Often, these genotoxins enter water systems as municipal runoff and industrial effluent. If damaged DNA occurs within certain genes or cell types, it can proliferate and cause significant impacts within the individual (e.g. tumors) or within the population (e.g. reduced species fitness). The use of in vitro assays is the first step to determining the severity of genotoxic loading within a water system. The original purpose of this experiment was to use the CHO-Kl (Chinese hamster ovary cells) cell line in conjunction with the comet assay in order to determine if there are genotoxins in the waterways of Horry County, South Carolina. This cell line is robust and used in many assays, but, when exposed to the water samples, they lysed. Those cells could not be used because they would create false positives in the comet assay. The failure of this project was due to time constraints, stochastic factors, and issues with osmolarity.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Hale, Casey, "A Review of a Survey of the Genotoxicity of Horry County Waterways" (2005). Honors Theses. 217.
https://digitalcommons.coastal.edu/honors-theses/217