FINAL WHEN SALT AND SUGAR AND VEGETABLES ARE POSITIVE, HOW CAN GENOTOXICITY DATA SERVE TO INFORM RISK ASSESSMENT?

Genotoxicity is a conditional property of a chemical, i.e., a chemical may be positive for genotoxicity under certain conditions and negative under a different set of conditions. Accordingly, in genetic toxicology screening research, results are generally reported with a concluding statement that a test material is either positive or negative “under the experimental conditions used”. In some studies, negative findings are presented as a “failure ” to detect a genotoxic response following examination in the test system of choice. Yet in other reports, negative results are often contextualized with the statement that the test system being used may not be “sensitive enough ” to detect a weak genotoxic response. And to further confound the situation, in many instances, especially when a large body of genotoxicity data exists, conflicting positive, negative, and equivocal results are often reported for the same end point by different investigators. All these caveats and contradictions instill a certain degree of ambiguity and uncertainty to the results obtained with genetox tests and to the conclusions drawn from them. This conundrum is further accentuated by the demonstration of genotoxic activity for life-sustaining chemicals such as common table salt and sugar