for moisture determination and is sanctioned by officiating bodies such as AOCS and IUPAC 3 5 . The KF method is time-consuming, relatively expensive to operate and maintain, and requires hazardous chemicals 3 5 . Therefore, the development of chemical free rapid methods to determine moisture in olive oil is of interest since the concentration of moisture is potentially a marker for grade qualities of olive oil 6 . Spectroscopic methods are well suited for process-control applications because they are fast and can be easily implemented in-line or at-line. Among spectroscopic techniques, near-infrared NIR spectroscopy is generally

A flow cytometric procedure for determining mitotic index (MI) as part of the metaphase chromosome aberrations assay, developed and utilized routinely at Pfizer as part of their standard assay design, has been adopted successfully by Covance laboratories. This method, using antibodies against phosphorylated histone tails (H3PS10) and nucleic acid stain, has been evaluated by the two independent test sites and compared to manual scoring. Primary human lymphocytes were treated with cyclophosphamide, mitomycin C, benzo(a)pyrene, and etoposide at concentrations inducing dose‐dependent cytotoxicity. Deming regression analysis indicates that the results generated via flow cytometry (FCM) were more consistent between sites than those generated via microscopy. Further analysis using the Bland–Altman modification of the Tukey mean difference method supports this finding, as the standard deviations (SDs) of differences in MI generated by FCM were less than half of those generated manually. Decreases in scoring variability owing to the objective nature of FCM, and the greater number of cells analyzed, make FCM a superior method for MI determination. In addition, the FCM method has proven to be transferable and easily integrated into standard genetic toxicology laboratory operations. Environ. Mol. Mutagen. 2012. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Statistical methods currently recommended for analysis of in vitro micronucleus data are based on small sample sizes. The tests are designed to evaluate linear trends and differences between treated and control samples. When using flow cytometric analysis, >5 times the number of cells are easily evaluated, and the variance estimates from these large samples are small. Application of these recommended tests to large samples resulted in statistically significant outcomes which were not considered to be biologically meaningful. Alternative statistical methods for testing trends and differences among treatments that were either widely used, or sample-size independent, were investigated. Using data from 95 experiments (from 2011-2013) where 19% of the experiments were considered positive, results for the various statistical methods were compared. When using either the recommended or alternate methods, 42-68% of the experiments resulted in statistically significant results (p < 0.05). A new concept was then tested using the same data sets: the "z' factor", designed to identify 'hits' during high throughput screening. Using this simple-to-compute statistic the number of significant calls was reduced to 27%. Then, when combined with a biological criterion based on historical vehicle control data, there was restoration of the original positive frequency (19%). Given the larger sample sizes evaluated using flow cytometry, we have demonstrated that traditional statistical tests may be overly sensitive to small changes in micronucleus induction, and that a simple-to-compute index of separation (z') may be a better tool for analysis, provided that the response is first determined to be biologically meaningful. Environ. Mol. Mutagen. 57:589-604, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.