Application of the yeast comet assay in testing of food additives for genotoxicity

•The genotoxic, suppressive and cytotoxic effect of several food additives have been studied.•The Comet Assay on higher eukaryotic cells with Comet Assay on yeast cells has been compared.•We propose a more sensitive method of Comet Assay for further study of substances suspicious for genotoxicity.

Different kinds of additives are widely applied in food industry. The rationale for their use is preservation, coloring or sweetening of diverse foods. Though it has been proven that some additives possess cytotoxic effect they are still used in practice. As a justification of their use is being their low concentration of application. We have used the method of Comet assay to detect minimal concentrations at which a group of selected food additives could damage DNA. Five substances, commonly added in foods and one in pharmaceutical drugs showed DNA damaging effectively at concentrations lower than that used in practice. Additionally, we have compared the sensitivity of higher eukaryotic cells with yeast to genotoxic effect of these compounds. The higher sensitivity of yeast cells revealed by the comet assay was undoubtedly demonstrated.