Effects of two plant growth regulators, indole-3-acetic acid and β-naphthoxyacetic acid, on genotoxicity in Drosophila SMART assay and on proliferation and viability of HEK293 cells from the perspective of carcinogenesis.

In this study, the mutagenic and recombinogenic effects of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), a plant growth regulator naturally synthesized in plants but produced synthetically, and β-naphthoxyacetic acid (BNOA), a synthetic plant growth regulator widely used in agricultural regions, were investigated using the somatic mutation and recombination test (SMART) in Drosophila wings. The effect of the same plant growth regulators against the proliferation and viability of a human immortalized embryonic kidney HEK293 cells which is at the early stage of carcinogenesis were also examined with MTT and trypan-blue exclusion assays. For the SMART assay, two different crosses were used: a standard and a high-bioactivation (HB) cross, involving the flare-3 and the multiple wing hairs markers. The HB cross involved flies characterized by an increased cytochrome P-450-dependent bioactivation capacity, which permits the more efficient biotransformation of promutagens and procarcinogens. In both crosses, the wings of the two types of progeny, inversion-free marker heterozygotes and balancer heterozygotes, were analyzed. The results show that IAA and BNOA are not mutagenic or recombinogenic in the wing cells of Drosophila. Furthermore, neither plant growth regulator affected the proliferation rate of HEK293 cells; however, both of them induced cell death at high concentrations.