In vitro and in vivo ion beam targeted micro-irradiation for radiobiology

The main goal of radiobiology is to understand the effects of ionizing radiations on the living. These past decades, ion microbeams have shown to be important tools to study for example the effects of low dose exposure, or the bystander effect. Since 2003, the CENBG has been equipped with a system to perform targeted micro-irradiation of living samples. Recently, microbeams applications on this subject have diversified and the study of DNA repair mechanisms at the cellular and multicellular scales, in vitro and in vivo, has become possible thanks to important evolutions of fluorescence imaging techniques and cellular biology. To take into account these new approaches, the CENBG micro-irradiation beamline has been entirely redesigned and rebuilt to implement new features and to improve the existing ones. My PhD objectives were i) commissioning the facility, ii) characterizing the system on track etch detectors, and on living samples, iii) implementing protocols to perform targeted irradiations of living samples with a con-trolled delivered dose, at the cellular and multicellular scales, and to visualize the early consequences online, iv) modelling these irradiations to explain the biological results using the calculated physical data. The work of these past years has allowed us i) to measure the performances of our system: a beam spot size of about 2 μm and a targeting accuracy of ± 2 μm, and to develop ion detection systems for an absolute delivered dose control, ii) to create highly localized radiation-induced DNA damages and to see online the recruitment of DNA repair proteins, iii) to apply these protocols to generate radiation-induced DNA damages in vivo inside a multicellular organism at the embryonic stage: Caenorhabditis elegans. These results have opened up many perspectives on the study of the interaction between ionizing radiations and the living, at the cellular and multicellular scales, in vitro and in vivo. (author)