Abstract

Industrial and agricultural effluents represent wide spread contaminants of the aquatic environment. In a trial to assess the toxic effects of these pollutants, primary liver cell's culture of Spot fish (Leiostomus xanthurus) was used as an alternative new biological model of the whole organisms. The obtained results indicated that some cytotoxic effects such as lysosomes (NR), mitochondria (MTT) dysfunction and, cell wall integrity (CV) were observed on the liver cells at the lower concentrations of this toxic chemicals. For NR, MTT and CV assays, the absorbance measurements (as a percent of control) were ranged 36.2-115.8, 37.8-104.2 and 22.6-109.2; 41.7-126.3, 44.3-124.1 and 25.7-126.5 and 53.2-132.7, 57.7-137.3 and 32.6-133.2 for paper, petroleum industries and agricultural effluents, respectively. Consequently, CV is more sensitive to industrial and agricultural effluents when compared with other assays. On the other side, the influence of such effluents ort the biochemical assays such as growth assay (GA, as determined by protein analysis), protease activity (PA) and lactic dehydrogenase activity (LDH) of isolated liver cells were determined in a trial to make a comparison between biochemical and cytotoxicity assays. The present data demonstrated that all of cytotoxic assays i.e. NR, MIT and CV corresponded well to those with GA, PA and LDH assays. The results of this study can constitute a milestone toward application of the simple inexpensive laboratory biological-model system for screening of the acute toxicities of aquatic pollutants.