thumb|Figure comparing the effects of exposure to genotoxic agents (aneugens and clastogens) on DNA. Aneugens induce mis-segregation of chromosomes into daughter cells while clastogens break the DNA and chromosome. A clastogen is a mutagenic agent that disturbs normal DNA related processes or directly causes DNA strand breakages, thus causing the deletion, insertion, or rearrangement of entire chromosome sections. These processes are a form of mutagenesis which if left unrepaired, or improperly repaired, can lead to cancer. Known clastogens include acridine yellow, benzene, ethylene oxide, ars
thumb|Figure comparing the effects of exposure to genotoxic agents (aneugens and clastogens) on DNA. Aneugens induce mis-segregation of chromosomes into daughter cells while clastogens break the DNA and chromosome. A clastogen is a mutagenic agent that disturbs normal DNA related processes or directly causes DNA strand breakages, thus causing the deletion, insertion, or rearrangement of entire chromosome sections. These processes are a form of mutagenesis which if left unrepaired, or improperly repaired, can lead to cancer. Known clastogens include acridine yellow, benzene, ethylene oxide, arsenic, phosphine, mimosine, actinomycin D, camptothecin, methotrexate, methyl acrylate, resorcinol and 5-fluorodeoxyuridine. Additionally, 1,2-dimethylhydrazine is a known colon carcinogen and shows signs of possessing clastogenic activity. There are many clastogens not listed here and research is ongoing to discover new clastogens. Some known clastogens only exhibit clastogenic activity in certain cell types, such as caffeine which exhibits clastogenic activity in plant cells. Researchers are interested in clastogens for researching cancer, as well as for other human health concerns such as the inheritability of clastogen effected paternal germ cells that lead to fetus developmental defects.
== Mechanism == thumb|Summary of theories of the mechanisms of chromosomal aberrations: A, ‘classic’ breaks theory; B, ‘mis-repair of breaks’ theory; C, ‘repair-created breaks’ theory. Adapted from Bignold. There is not one all encompassing method by which clastogens damage chromosomal DNA, instead different clastogens have unique ways they interact with DNA, or DNA associated proteins, and disrupt normal function. Broadly these different types of clastogenic activity can be organized into three classes: ‘classic’ breaks theory; ‘mis-repair of breaks’ theory and ‘repair-created breaks’ theory. It may not always be known how a clastogen causes chromosomal damage.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).