Construction and application of 210Po alpha-emitting exposure devices for radiobiological experiments

One way of studying the risk of low-level ionising radiation exposure to human health is to carry out biological experiments on living cell cultures. The general objective of the present work is to contribute to the exploration of the relationship between biological effects and radiation burden caused by high LET radiation investigating the correlations between factual hits or macroscopic dose and biological responses. The specific objectives are to construct appropriate alpha-irradiating systems and to study the targeted and non-targeted effects of alpha particles in human lung cell cultures to quantify the biophysical effect of radon and its progenies. Several types of cell biological experiments are being carried out with this alpha-irradiating system e.g. investigation of adaptive response, bystander effect and their correlations, measurements of transformation probabilities as a function of alpha dose and alpha-hit probabilities; genomic instability studies for radiation induced mutations and neoplastic transformations. (authors)