More than 10 years ago, Jim Quinn, a behavioral ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, determined that herring gulls nesting near steel mills around the Great Lakes displayed higher heritable mutation rates than their rural cousins. In May Quinn and one of his students, Chris Somers, were finally able to pin the blame on airborne particles just a few micrometers in diameter.
They found that offspring born from male mice exposed to industrial air pollution showed twice the mutation rate of those whose fathers breathed rural or filtered polluted air. The most likely cause, Quinn says, are small particles that can carry known mutation-causing compounds, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, deep into the lungs. Because particulates as well as polycyclic hydrocarbons are found in cigarette smoke, it’s likely that smoking could cause similar mutations.
The changes that Quinn saw showed up in genomic segments once known as junk DNA ...
