Specificities of bio-antimutagens in plant kingdom.

Abstract

Desmutagens are defined as agents that' inactivate chemical mutagens by working directly on them.^On the other hand, we like to call bio-antimutagens those agents suppressing cellular mutagenesis. Bio-antimutagens of diverse chemical types have been recently isolated from different plants and characterized, for example, protoanemonin from Ranunculus,2) cinnamaldehyde from cinnamon,3) and enmein from Enmeiso.4) Since these antimutagens were isolated with the criterion of reducing the frequency of UV-induced mutations of E. coli B/r trp involving the SOSDNA-repair function, it is interesting to know if antimutagenic factors of similar specificities exist universally in the plant kingdom. The other implication of surveying them in plants relates to their functions. We previously found that a typical bio-antimutagen such as cobaltous chloride working in UV-induced mutations in the above E. coli B/r strain also antagonized to a high frequency mutations due to a temperature-sensitive DNApolymerase III in B. subtilis.5'6) Therefore, it is interesting to examine if the UV-induced SOS repair might involve a kind of DNA-replicating polymerase, as suggested by Bridges et al.7)