“…In the pulmonary system, it has been observed that ozone can exacerbate asthma (Mar and Koenig, 2009), causes inflammation in the airway in healthy humans (Chimenti et al, 2009; Alexis et al, 2010), generate reactive oxygen species and cause DNA breaks in vivo in different animal models (Bermúdez et al, 1999; Haney et al, 1999; Bornholdt et al, 2002; Ferng, 2002) and human alveolar epithelial cells (Kosmider et al, 2010). In the current study, we confirmed that ozone induced DNA breaks in HBECs (Gabrielson et al, 1994; Lee et al, 1996) and that the effects of ozone were limited to about 4 h in the conditions studied (Bornholdt et al, 2002). Further, we demonstrated that wortmannin, a DNA repair inhibitor, did enhance the effects of ozone and prolonged the duration of existence of the fragments.…”