Abstract

One reason for increased incidence of various types of cancer are environmental pollutants particularly of anthropogenic origin. All human activities may pollute the environment, but some have significant impact, just to mention energy industry, mining, transportation, chemical and petrochemical industries and housing. Environmental pollutants are a large group of compounds in terms of their physicochemical properties, some of which may disturb the biochemical processes going on in the living organism causing toxic and genotoxic effects. Surface water contaminated by urban and industrial effluents are becoming a wide reservoir of these compounds, and the current wastewater treatment technologies are not always able to meet this challenge. Research conducted in the Department of Analytical Chemistry in collaboration with the Department of food chemistry, technology and biotechnology were focused on the determination of genotoxic potential of wastewater samples. Samples of influent and effluent of wastewater were collected in 2013 from all the major sewage treatment plant sites across Poland. Genotoxic potential of the samples was analyzed by comet assay, using a HT29 cell line. Results obtained for the influent samples ranged from 5,91 to 44,44 percent of DNA in tail of the “comet”, and for those collected in the effluent form 5,32 to 50,96 percent of DNA. Comparing the results obtained for samples of wastewater there was an apparent decrease in genotoxicity for effluent samples, however, in a few cases, an increase of genotoxicity was observed for samples collected after the sewage treatment plant. Such cases can attest to the fact that some of the wastewater treatment techniques do not appear to be sufficient to remove compounds that could damage DNA and contribute to many cancer cases.

Authors (4)