Affiliation:
1. Canadian Medical Research Council Group in Radiation Sciences, Department of Nuclear Medicine and Radiobiology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Sherbrooke, Québec J1H 5N4, Canada.
Abstract
Most of the energy deposited in cells by ionizing radiation is channeled into the production of abundant free secondary electrons with ballistic energies between 1 and 20 electron volts. Here it is shown that reactions of such electrons, even at energies well below ionization thresholds, induce substantial yields of single- and double-strand breaks in DNA, which are caused by rapid decays of transient molecular resonances localized on the DNA's basic components. This finding presents a fundamental challenge to the traditional notion that genotoxic damage by secondary electrons can only occur at energies above the onset of ionization, or upon solvation when they become a slowly reacting chemical species.
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Reference39 articles.
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