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Atrazine was introduced at the market in 1958 as a triazine herbicide used for the control of broadleaf weeds. It is mostly applied pre-emergence to corn, sorghum, coffee, wheat, sugarcane, in conifer forests, on Christmas tree farms on golf courses and residential lawns. Workers handling pesticides in their production and application are exposed to thousand fold higher concentrations of active ingredients than general population in residential exposure. Further, they are not exposed to active ingredients only, but to entire pesticide formulations. Since they contain wide range of chemical substances together with the atrazine as active ingredient we aimed to evaluate possible genotoxicity of Gesaprim &reg ; as one of its commercially available formulations. Alkaline comet assay and chromosomal aberration analysis on peripheral blood lymphocytes were used to test 3 different concentration of Gesaprim expressed in terms of the final concentration of atrazine in the whole blood cultures (0, 047 μ g/ml, 0, 47 μ g/ml, 4, 7 μ g/ml). Pesticide formulation was tested in the presence of metabolic activator. Lymphocytes were treated for 30 and 8 hours. Both tail length and tail moment increased with the duration of the treatment. They were found to be significantly elevated already after 30 minutes of treatment. After the 8 hours treatment number of chromatid and chromosome breaks has been found to be significantly elevated. It was evident that genotoxicity results for pure active ingredient and commercial formulation differ significantly for the more realistic risk assessment in occupational exposure, testing of entire pesticide formulation should be considered.

Atrazine was introduced at the market in 1958 as a triazine herbicide used for the control of broadleaf weeds. It is mostly applied pre-emergence to corn, sorghum, coffee, wheat, sugarcane, in conifer forests, on Christmas tree farms on golf courses and residential lawns. Until now there are more than 100 different pesticide formulations with atrazine as active ingredient. Beside atrazine they contain various chemical compounds that should facilitate pesticide application, atrazine penetration into the plant and increase its toxicity. In this work human lymphocytes were treated with three different concentrations (0, 047 μ g/ml, 0, 47 μ g/ml, 4, 7 μ g/ml) of both, atrazine and Gesaprim&reg ; , its formulation. Lymphocytes were treated for 30 minutes and 8 hours. We measured DNA damaging potency of atrazine and Gesaprim&reg ; by alkaline comet assay. For atrazine as pure active ingredient we observed significant increase in DNA migration ability only at the highest concentration used after 8 hours of treatment. At all three concentrations tested Gesaprim&reg ; significantly increased the tail length and tail intensity values even after the 30 minutes of treatment. According to these results it is evident that genetoxicity of pure active ingredient and its commercial formulation differ significantly. It could be due to genotoxic effect of additives in the formulation themselves and/or their effect on elevating of the atrazine genotoxicity potential.