Evidence has accumulated showing that ionizing radiations persistently perturb genomic stability and induce delayed reproductive death in the progeny of survivors; however, the linear energy transfer (LET) dependence of these inductions has not been fully characterized. We have investigated the cell killing effectiveness of gamma rays (0.2 keV/microm) and six different beams of heavy-ion particles with LETs ranging from 16.2 to 1610 keV/microm in normal human fibroblasts. First, irradiated confluent density-inhibited cultures were plated for primary colony formation, revealing that the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) based on the primary 10% survival dose peaked at 108 keV/microm and that the inactivation cross section increased proportionally up to 437 keV/microm. Second, cells harvested from primary colonies were plated for secondary colony formation, showing that delayed reproductive death occurred in a dose-dependent fashion. While the RBE based on the secondary 80% survival dose peaked at 108 keV/microm, very little difference in LET was observed in the RBE based on secondary survival at the primary 10% survival dose. Our present results indicate that delayed reproductive death arising only during secondary colony formation is independent of LET and is more likely to be dependent on initial damages having been fixed during primary colony formation.
Significant evidence indicates that ionizing radiation causes biological effects in nonirradiated bystander cells having received signals from directly irradiated cells. There is little information available hitherto as to the bystander effect of energetic heavy ions; however, our previous work has shown that in confluent cultures of normal human fibroblast AG01522 cells, targeted exposure of 0.0003% of cells to microbeams of 18.3 MeV/u 12 C (103 keV/µm) and 13.0 MeV/u 20 Ne (375 keV/µm) ions can similarly cause almost 10% decreases in the clonogenic survival, and twofold increments in the incidence of apoptosis whose temporal kinetics varies between irradiated and bystander cells. Using this experimental system, here we further report that bystander responses of AG01522 cells to 17.5 MeV/u 20 Ne ions (294 keV/µm) are consistent with those to 18.3 MeV/u 12 C and 13.0 MeV/u 20 Ne ions. We also demonstrate that such bystander-induced reductions in the survival are less pronounced and occur independently of Bcl-2 overexpression in human cervical cancer HeLa cells.
Biological effectiveness varies with the linear energy transfer (LET) of ionizing radiation. Plentiful evidence has been presented demonstrating that at physically equivalent doses, high-LET energetic heavy ions are more cytotoxic and genotoxic than low-LET photons like X-rays and γ-rays. Notwithstanding, its potential impact at isosurvival doses is yet to be characterized. Here we investigated the cell-killing effectiveness of γ-rays (0.2 keV/µm) and five different beams of heavy ions with LET ranging from 16.2 to 1610 keV/µm in confluent cultures of normal human fibroblasts. The relative biological effectiveness based on the dose giving 10% clonogenic survival peaked at 108 keV/µm. In cultures exposed to the 10% survival doses, the yield of apoptotic cells escalated with time postirradiation but declined with LET. Our results imply that the cell death mode differs with LET at isosurvival levels.
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