Respuestas
Studies with animals are easier to carry out, since we can expose laboratory mice to a contaminated environment and later compare their genomes with the genomes of mice not exposed to that environment, to check if the contamination has caused mutations in your genes. These types of studies have been carried out by a group of Canadian researchers, who have published their disturbing results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in the USA.
The researchers exposed a group of mice to the air around blast furnaces near a busy highway, and exposed another group of mice (the control group) to filtered and purified air. After several weeks of exposure to the two types of atmospheres, they analyzed the possible genetic mutations in the sperm produced by male mice. The results are distressing.
The DNA from the sperm of the mice exposed to the contaminated environment contained no less than 60% more mutations than the sperm from male mice that breathed pure air. Not content with this, the DNA of the mice that breathed contaminated air was also more fractionated, that is, broken, broken into pieces, than the DNA of the lucky filtered air respirators. And the story does not end there: the DNA of mice that breathed contaminated air was also chemically modified. In particular, said DNA had incorporated more methyl groups (-CH3) than the DNA of the control group mice. It is known that DNA methylation, which is called the incorporation of methyl groups, modifies the functioning of genes, which affects the biology and behavior of cells even if no mutations occurred.
genetic mutations in animals caused by pollution.