Chloroform has been extensively studied for genotoxic
potential in a range of short-term screening assays. A more detailed, tabulated
presentation of available data is given in the source document (Environment
Canada & Health Canada, 2001).
Chloroform gave no evidence of mutagenic activity in the vast majority
of a large number of assays in Salmonella typhimurium and Escherichia
coli bacteria, although two papers report weak activity in, respectively,
four Salmonella strains (Varma et al., 1988) and a single Salmonella strain (Pegram et al., 1997) at toxic/ lethal concentrations. Chloroform evidently did not
cause chromosome aberrations in human lymphocytes in culture. Sister chromatid
exchange (SCE) assays have given mixed results, but tests for unscheduled
DNA synthesis (UDS) have consistently given no evidence of activity in
a range of human and laboratory animal cells. In vivo, three of four bone marrow micronuclei studies in mice were clearly negative
(Gocke et al., 1981; Salamone et al., 1981; Tsuchimoto & Matter, 1981), and the fourth (Agustin & Lim-Sylianco,
1978) was equivocal. Chloroform induced micronuclei formation in the kidney
(Robbiano et al., 1998) and liver (Sasaki et al., 1998) of rats and chromosome damage (aberrations)
in the bone marrow of rats (Fujie et al., 1990); a hamster bone marrow chromosome aberration study also gave evidence
of a weak effect (Hoechst, 1987). Weak DNA binding has been reported in
the rat liver and kidney (Pereira et al., 1982) and the mouse kidney, lung, liver, and stomach following intraperitoneal
injection (Colacci et al., 1991), and there have been mixed results for sperm abnormalities in mice
(Topham, 1980, 1981; Land et al., 1981) and a positive SCE result in mouse bone marrow (Morimoto & Koizumi,
1983). For other end-points (e.g., UDS in rat and mouse hepatocytes, DNA
adducts, methylation, strand breaks and repair in mouse liver, DNA damage
in rat liver and kidney), in vivo results have been negative (Petzold & Swenberg, 1978; Diaz-Gomez &
Castro, 1980; Mirsalis et al., 1982; Reitz et al., 1982; Larson et al., 1994d; Potter et al., 1996; Butterworth et al., 1998; Pereira et al., 1998).
In conclusion, most studies did not identify genotoxic potential for
chloroform. Results from a few, non-standard studies indicate the possibility of
a weak positive response in rats. Overall, however, the weight of evidence
indicates that chloroform does not have significant genotoxic potential.
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