Agroquímicos en Argentina: Genotoxicidad y citotoxicidad inducida por principios activos y sus formulaciones comerciales

one of the major goals of our research laboratory is to evaluate comparatively the genotoxic and cytotoxic effects exerted by several pure agrochemicals and their technical formulations commonly used in argentina on vertebrate cells in vitro and in vivo. among them are listed the herbicides 2,4-d and 2,4-d dma？, dicamba and banvel？, the fungicide zineb and azzurro？, the insecticides carbofuran and furadan？, pirimicarb and aficida？, and the endectocide ivermectin and ivomec？. the sce, comet assay, micronuclei, chromosomal aberrations, cell-cycle progression, spindle disturbances, mtt and neutral red assays were used as end-points for geno and cytotoxicity. overall, the results clearly demonstrated that the damage induced by the commercial formulations is in general greater than that produced by the pure pesticides, suggesting the presence of deleterious components in the excipients with a toxic additive effect over the pure agrochemicals. accordingly, the results highlight that: 1) a complete knowledge of the toxic effect/s of the active ingredient is not enough in biomonitoring studies; 2) pesticide/s toxic effect/s should be evaluated according to the commercial formulation available in market; 3) the deleterious effect/s of the excipient/s present within the commercial formulation should not be either discarded nor underestimated, and 4) a single bioassay is not enough to characterize the toxicity of a agrochemical under study.