Genotoxicity

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The potential to cause harm to genetic material, resulting in mutations or the disruption of normal cellular function
2. A characteristic that indicates the ability to inflict damage on DNA, possibly leading to genetic mutations or diseases
3. The quality of having the ability to impair or alter DNA within cells, potentially causing harmful genetic changes

Etymology: "Genotoxicity" is a modern scientific coinage, built from two parts that each carry a clear meaning. The first is "geno-", from Greek "genos", meaning "birth, origin, kind", which gives English words about genes and heredity. The second is "toxicity", the quality of being poisonous, from Greek "toxikon", the poison in which arrows were dipped. Put together, the sense is a poisoning of the genetic material itself. The word is formed either by joining "geno-" to "toxicity" or by adding "-ity" to "genotoxic", which is itself built the same way from "geno-" and "toxic". Either route leads to the same meaning: the capacity of an agent to damage DNA. Because the term combines two modern scientific elements, it belongs to the same family as other late twentieth-century words built from Greek roots for molecular biology.