A
One of the first things I would do is find an organism or panel of organisms to test the peroxide in. Maybe it affects bacteria but not fungi, or animals but not plants. If you know more about the peroxide and what you'll use it for, you could potentially narrow the list of organisms to look at. If you don't know that much about it though, you could select some samples from fungi, animals, plants, and bacteria for the experiment. You're also looking at mutagenesis, so it would be helpful if you already had a genome sequence for each organism.
Then you'd see what happens when you add the peroxide, vs what happens when you don't add the peroxide. You'll need some kind of control, like specimens that get a dose of whatever the peroxide is diluted in (but contains no peroxide). There are a lot of things you could look for when looking for signs of mutagenesis. Any obvious phenotypes? Do the sequences of certain genes change? If so, which genes? (Try not to look for too many factors unless you have a very large sample size or know how to do something like a bonferroni correction, because the probability of at least one type I error goes up as you do more hypothesis tests).
Then you could find whatever differences are statistically significant vs control, and for which species. A fun followup could be looking into why certain species (if any) are more or less susceptible to mutagenesis from the peroxide, or how different concentrations of peroxide impact the results.
B
If you do see any mutagenic affects, you could then create a few conditions:
- no peroxide and no antioxidant
- Peroxide but no antioxidant
- Antioxidant but no peroxide
- Both peroxide and antioxidant
Then you could repeat the experiment with these conditions and see if you notice any statistically significant changes in mutagenesis from adding the peroxide.
