To our knowledge, this study represents the first attempt to
evaluate genotoxicity associated with acute ammonia toxicity
in tilapia fish (O. niloticus)and there are no direct comparisons
in the same experiments of ammonia and hypoxia tolerance, despite the high likelihood that fish experiencing hypoxia may
also experience high (10 mg/L) ammonia levels (and vice versa).
Ammonia was found to be the main acute toxic compounds
in leachate as determined by [18] who found that DNA damage was induced in fish exposed to diluted raw leachate and
that coincide with the findings in this study.
In the present study, the RAPD-PCR technique was used to
determine the potential acute (6 days) ammonia genotoxicity
inO. niloticus.Different and distinctive finger pattern were obtained from O. niloticusDNA under investigation. Primers
used in the O. niloticusDNA exposed to Ammonia yielded
RAPD patterns differ from the control fish. This indicated that
DNA from fish exposed to Ammonia created polymorphic regions in the O. niloticusgenome.
The main changes in the RAPD profiles of the present
investigation were the gain or loss of different bands (group
2 and 3) and variation in their intensity (The three groups under investigation). These effects might be due to the structural
rearrangements in DNA caused by different types of DNA
damages. Appearance of new bands can be explained as a result of different DNA structural changes such as breaks, transpositions and deletions as reported by[14,4].
Estimation about the existence of mutation and structural
alterations in O. niloticusDNA exposed to ammonia on the
bases of DNA patterns could be obtained after RAPD with
a set of random primers. The variation in band intensity and
disappearance of some bands may correlate with the level of
DNA damage after exposure to ammonia, which can change
the number of binding sites for Taq polymerase. That due
to, the TaqDNA polymerase is the most commonly used enzyme in DNA sequencing. As a result, the G track generated
during DNA sequencing by theseTaqpolymerases does not
terminate prematurely, and higher molecular-mass G bands
are detected. Another property of theseTaqpolymerases is
that the sequencing patterns produced by these enzymes are
remarkably even in band-intensity and peak-height distribution