Biological significance of radiation studies in bacterial spores

Studies on physical and physicochemical mechanisms of radiation-induced damage in cells are possible in bacterial spores because of their resistance to environments ordinarily lethal to vegetative cells. This brief review describes some of these studies that demonstrate the existence of a number of independent radiation effects, the roles of water in modifying these, the participation of the hydroxyl radical in some, the importance of DNA as a target molecule, the multicomponent nature of the O2 effect, and the kinds of the associations of water with the critical target