The distribution patterns of sister chromatid exchanges in V79 Chinese hamster cells: relevance to genotoxicity studies.

Sister chromatid exchanges (SCEs) are routinely used in genotoxic studies. The observations that some agents induce SCEs without altering the SCE distribution, while others disrupt such distribution, support the use of SCE distribution as a tool to distinguish between agents which damage DNA and agents which interfere with the replication machinery. In addition to that, it was found that compounds belonging to the latter group, are also able to induce gene amplification. Despite the mechanism by which the two phenomena could be associated is undefined, an aberrant induction of SCEs as a basis of gene amplification it must be taken into account.