During course of this project, we have worked in several areas relevant to low-dose ionizing radiation.
In-Vivo Human Time Course DataWe have three papers from data derived from the human in-vivo low-dose studies, two published and one still under review. The first (Goldberg et al. 2005) evaluated differences in gene expression due to dose. Human skin samples from men exposed to 0, 1, 10, and 100 cGy during the initial radiotherapy treatment for prostate cancer were analyzed for gene expression using the Affymetrix HGU133 Plus 2.0 platform. This study was funded under the predecessor grant to this one (DOE DE-FG03-01ER63237), as were several important methods papers that were used in the subsequent projects from the present grant. These included Berglund et al. (2007) The second (Berglund et al. 2008) examined transient changes in expression over time from a low dose. Using the same protocol and analysis methods, we analyzed nineteen gene groups and seven pathways for transient response, defined here as a transcriptional response that is elevated or depressed at 3 and 8 hours compared to the baseline at 0, and at 24 hours. We found nine gene groups that showed such transient differential expression.The third (Kalanetra et al. 2013) is a more detailed examination of time-course behavior of gene expression from in-vivo exposed skin. In this new data set, we have split observations at 0, 3, 8, and 24 hours post irradiation by 10cGy (eight samples per subject) and eight patients with usable samples. We obtained comprehensive gene expression data using the Illumina platform and utilizing a complex data analysis strategy we obtained 1766 differentially expressed genes. We found that pathways associated with apoptosis and survival, development, cell adhesion, DNA damage, immune response, signal transduction, cytoskeleton remodeling, G-protein signaling, cCTP/CTP and cUTP/UTP metabolism, cell cycle, ATP and ITP metabolism, GTP and XTP metabolism, and CFTR folding and maturation were all significantly affected. This is in review.
MatTek EpiDermFT Skin PlugsDespite being widely investigated, cell lines grown as monolayers provide a limited insight on the biological processes occurring under a given condition. EpiDermFT is a three-dimensional skin model which is composed of normal human epidermal keratinocytes (NHEK) and normal human dermal fibroblasts (NHDF). This skin model is mainly utilized for studying human skin responses to cosmetics and topical agents. We