Lower and higher plants and plant cell cultures as biomarkers for the detection of promutagens

There are two fundamental purposes of using plants, in addition to microbial and animal biomarkers, to monitor for environmental mutagens: a) plants can metabolize promutagens into mutagens and stores these mutagenic products that can be introduced into the human food chain; and b) these mutagens can also damage plant ecological systems. The final objective of this project is to generate a series of "in vivo" and "in vitro" methods, based in plants, for the assessement of environmental pollutants.