Analysis of biological functions using heavy-ion microbeam irradiation system at JAEA-Takasaki

Abstract

The application of localized radiation using heavy-ion microbeams eliminates the effect of non-uniform ion hits on cell population, since individual cells can be irradiated one by one with a defined number of energetic heavy ions. Another advantage associated with the use of heavy-ion microbeam irradiation concerns the precise detection of ion-hit position on micron-scale targets to obtain the information on the position of ion traversal and on cellular responses induced by ion hit simultaneously. Therefore microbeam is an operative means to elucidate initial cellular responses together with the relationship with ion track structure. The use of heavy-ion microbeams has not been restricted to the area of radiation biology. Targeted irradiation using heavy-ion microbeams has been applied to various biological studies, such as plant physiology or developmental biology, as a radio-microsurgical tool to inactivate specific tissue or cell populations in multicellular organisms and to investigate their function. The outlines of these studies, which were carried out using our collimated heavy-ion microbeam at JAEA-Takasaki, will be introduced.