Abstract
Microbeam irradiation systems have become significant tools in the field of radiation biology and have discovered much important evidence that have never been described in the study using conventional broad beam irradiation. Single Particle Irradiation System to Cell, SPICE at National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS) is a proton microbeam irradiation system developed for low dose radiation effect studies, such as for the cellular response of targeted and non-targeted effects. SPICE provides 3.4 MeV proton microbeam with approximately, 2 μm in a diameter beam. Two thousand mammalian cells in 25 mm2 area per dish can be irradiated at speed of 400 cells per minute which completes within 10 minutes including image capturing, cell recognition, and irradiation. With this SPICE, we made advancements in the targeting, image capturing system and sample dish to irradiate zebra fish embryos to expand radio-biological studies using microbeam technique to radio-adaptive response studies in in vivo. SPICE were used to provide the primimg dose and X-ray photons were employed to provide the challenging dose to investigate radio-adaptive response in developmental stage of zebra fish embryos. In detailed experimental setup and the first result of irradiation of zebra-fish embryos will be presented.
Electrostatic accelerator facility of NIRS received a severe damage from the Tohoku-Kanto earthquake on March 11th, 2011, and currently, SPICE is under construction. Hopefully, SPICE will be renewed, and resume its operation by the beginning of April of 2012.
