Frequency of spontaneous chromosome aberrations in mice: effects of age.

In this paper, we present data on chromosome aberration frequencies in mice which served as unexposed controls in a variety of radiation and chemical toxicology experiments conducted in our laboratory in recent years. All chromosome aberration data were obtained by chromosome painting. In peripheral blood lymphocytes from 102 animals, the frequencies of translocations and insertions increased significantly with age. No increase with age was seen for dicentrics or acentric fragments. When the data were analyzed by strain, the age-related increase in translocation frequencies was observed only in the 71 homozygous C57BL/6 mice and not in any of the three heterozygous strains. Very few aberrations of any type were observed in 62 bone marrow samples, and no effect of age was seen for any aberration type in this tissue. These results are similar to those observed in unexposed humans, and suggest that the increase in translocations is not the result of accumulated damage from chronic 'background' environmental exposures but instead may be due to biological processes associated with aging.