Ames test provided an important way of screening thousands of compounds and evaluating one aspect of their risk to health and the environment. It is the important tool for the evaluation of safety of chemical compounds.
Aflatoxin B1, is a potent mutant that causes base pair substitutions but not frameshifts. Aflatoxin B1 is a powerful carcinogen that is covalently attached to guanine residues in the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid). The addition of the aflatoxin adduct destabilizes the N-glycosidic bond, leaving an abasic site.
The replicative polymerases cannot synthesize DNA across from an abasic site requiring the use of a bypass polymerase. In the absence of complementary base-pairing information, the polymerases will frequently incorporate the wrong nucleotide opposite the abasic site. This results in daughter cells with base-pair substitutions as observed in Ames test.