Initial events in the cellular effects of ionizing radiations: clustered damage in DNA

Ionizing radiations produce many hundreds of different simple chemical products in DNA and also multitudes of possible clustered combinations. The simple products, including single-strand breaks, tend to correlate poorly with biological effectiveness. Even for initial double-strand breaks, as a broad class, there is apparently little or no increase in yield with increasing ionization density, in contrast with the large rise in relative biological effectiveness for cellular effects. Track structure analysis has revealed that clustered DNA damage of severity greater than simple double-strand breaks is likely to occur at biologically relevant frequencies with all ionizing radiations. Studies are in progress to describe in more detail the chemical nature of these clustered lesions and to consider the implications for cellular repair. (author)