Dear Sir,

Regarding the letter concerning our article, González-Yebra et al. (2008), we want to make some statements.

First: We reported median instead of means because our data did not show a normal distribution.

We acknowledge the accidental typing error made in the text of the discussion where we wrote a median of 0, the correct value is 0.1 as shown in Table 3.

As for the alcohol consumption and its possible relationship with the induction of micronuclei, we carried out two types of analysis as described in the materials and methods. The Kruskal–Wallis test to identify differences between the study groups. With this analysis we found a significant difference between the alcohol consuming exposed group and the non alcohol consuming exposed group. Afterwards we conducted a multiple regression analysis to identify the variables associated with the presence of micronuclei, with this analysis we found no association with the consumption of alcohol. It is possible that the Kruskall–Wallis analysis shows a synergism between exposure to solvents and alcohol consumption.

We agree with the author of the letter on the irrelevance of the reference Fenech et al. (1985).

As for the commentary on the evaluation of only 1,000 exfoliated cells, we would like to emphasize that we scored at least one thousand cells (Material and methods right column last paragraph), according to Tolbert et al. (1992), Gonsebatt et al. (1997), Reis et al. (2002), Domínguez et al. (2005) and we can provide another reference, Wu et al. (2004).

We thank the advice on the evaluation of cells by means of oil immersion and magnification ×1,000 and may consider it for future studies.

With are positive that Fig 1b, is a broken egg phenomenon, clearly showing a smaller fragment irregularly shaped.

We apologize for the very few lapses in which we have incurred in our English writing on our paper, and most of all for not having erased the Spanish “nucleos rotos” for broken eggs.