The effects of a range of anti-cancer drugs in the white-ivory somatic mutation test in Drosophila.
The white-ivory test is based upon the reversion of the X-linked, recessive eye-colour mutation white-ivory to wild-type. Somatic reversion of white-ivory results in clones of red facets in the white-ivory eyes of eclosing adult flies. 4 anti-cancer drugs, bleomycin, adriamycin, mitoxantrone and cyclophosphamide were found to significantly increase the white-ivory reversion frequency whereas cytosine arabinoside, methotrexate and vincristine did not give positive results.