The Effects of Hypoxia, Metabolic Restriction and Magnetic Fields on Chromosome Instability and Karyotype Contraction in Cancer Cell Lines

This is an exhaustive thesis from the University of McGill Montreal:

A biological assay based on chromosome counts in human cancer cells was developed as an
index of metabolic state. The assay is then used to describe the action of a variety of metabolic
agents: oxygen, melatonin, vitamin C, the drugs oligomycin and imatinib, as well as extra-low
frequency (ELF) magnetic fields (MFs). This led us to uncover a basic mechanism of interaction
between ELF MFs and biological materials. The action of MFs is through an alteration in the
structure of water, originally described by Russian physicists at Lomonosov University in
Moscow, in the early 1980s.


Biological effects of ELF MFs have lacked a credible mechanism of interaction between fields
and living material. The karyotype changes produced by 6-day exposures to ELF MFs between
25 nT and 5 µT were evaluated in our five human cancer cell lines. Similar to the chemical
metabolic restrictors, all cancer cells lines lost chromosomes from all MF exposures, with a
mostly flat dose-response. Continued MF exposures for three weeks allow a rising return to the
baseline, unperturbed karyotypes. From this point, small MF increases or decreases are again
capable of inducing KCs. 
Our data suggests that the KCs are caused by MF interference with mitochondria’s ATP synthase
(ATPS), compensated by the action of AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK). The effects of
MFs are similar to those of the ATPS inhibitor oligomycin. They are amplified by metformin, an
AMPK stimulator, and attenuated by resistin, an AMPK inhibitor. Over environmental MFs,
KCs of various cancer cell lines show exceptionally wide and flat dose-responses, except for
those of erythro-leukemia cells, which display a progressive rise from 25 nT to 0.4 µT. 

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1404/1404.3604.pdf