Lack of effect of sodium fluoride on a maternal repair system in Drosophila oocytes.

Three-day-old females were fed with sodium fluoride, then mated for 24 h to ring-X males that had been irradiated with 2000 R of X-rays. The effect of NaF on the recovery of sex-chromosome loss and autosomal translocations, both induced in the paternal genome, was studied. In contrast with actinomycin-D and caffeine, treatment of females with NaF produced no consistent or significant alteration in the frequency of sex-chromosome loss and translocations recovered from irradiated males. Although there was a tendency for the translocation frequency to be slightly lower in the NaF series, the difference did not reach statistical significance. The present results concerning NaF cannot support the expectation that NaF might act as an inhibitor of maternal repair in Drosophila oocytes.