Micronuclear test is one of the most short-term and practical methods in cytogenetics. The correlation detected between the results of the micronuclear test and chromosomal aberrations analysis allows us to consider the relative amount of nuclear violations as the objective bioindicator of environmental influences. Thanks to the micronuclear test the mutagenic activity test of a large number of chemical, physical and biological agents was conducted (Kozhura and others, 2005; Butorina, 2007; Pavlov and others, 2007; Sycheva, 2012; Zemlyanova, Shcherbina, 2013; Byahova and others., 2014; Khakhulina, Kurchatova, 2014;), and in recent years micronuclear test is used as a non-invasive rapid method of human genome stability assessment (Kalaev and others, 2008, 2010, 2012; Korsakov and others, 2012; Meyer and others, 2014;). The purpose of this study was to determine the background values of the cytogenetic homeostasis indices of large modern city residents with the help of the micronuclear test. We examined different age groups of residents of Rostov-on-don: 80 school children of 11–12 years (group 1), 35 students of 18 to 23 years (group 2) and 52 adults 30–55 years (group 3). All surveyed had nuclear abnormalities in exfoliating cells of the buccal epithelium. Among nuclear defects the most frequent was the intussusception, ambiguous nucleus, microkernel, not so frequent were nucleus strangulation and caudate nucleus. The relative amount of nuclear abnormalities (%) varied in the first group from 2 to 18, on average 6,86 ± 0.44, in the second group it varied from 3 to 26, on average 8,17 ± 0,86. In the third group – from 2 to 28, on average 8.26 ± 0,91. Significant differences in the values of the specified index, depending on age and gender were not found. The comparison of the obtained results with other authors data (Zhuleva and others, 1996; Butorin and others, 2000; Korsakov and others, 2012) showed that the background values of the cytogenetic indices of large industrial cities residents are close enough. The fact is that among the modern inhabitants of large industrial centre the number of genetically defective cells is significantly greater than that one among the residents of Vietnam villages as relatively clean ones (1,98 %) and processed by phytotoxic pollutants in the 60-ies of the 20th century (3,79 %) (Zhuleva and others, 1996). In our opinion, this can once again indicate the extremely unfavorable ecological situation in large cities, which not only threaten the current health of the population, but also violates the genetic homeostasis.
The work is submitted to the International Scientific Conference “Fundamental and applied research in medicine”, France, Paris, October 14–21, 2014 came to the editorial office оn 15.09.2014.