In Silico Nanodosimetry New Insights into Nontargeted Biological Responses to Radiation.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine Volume 2012, Article ID 147252, 9 pages doi:10.1155/2012/147252 Research Article In Silico Nanodosimetry: New Insights into Nontargeted Biological Responses to Radiation Zdenka Kuncic,1 Hilary L. Byrne,1 Aimee L. McNamara,1 Susanna Guatelli,2 1, 3 ´ 4 Westa Domanova, and Sebastien Incerti 1 School of Physics, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia 2 Centre for Medical Radiation Physics, University of Woollongong, Wollongong, NSW 2522, Australia 3 Department of Physics, Technical University of Munich, 85748 Garching, Germany 4 Universite Bordeaux 1, CNRS/IN2P3, Centre d’Etudes Nucleaires de Bordeaux-Gradignan, 33175 Gradignan, France ´ ´ Correspondence should be addressed to Zdenka Kuncic, zdenka.kuncic@.au Received 21 February 2012; Accepted 2 April 2012 Academic Editor: Eva Bezak Copyright © 2012 Zdenka Kuncic et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The long-held view that radiation-induced biological damage must be initiated in the cell nucleus, either on or near DNA itself, is being confronted by mounting evidence to suggest otherwise. While the efficacy of cell death may be determined by radiation damage to nuclear DNA, a plethora of less deterministic biological responses has been observed when DNA is not targeted. These so-called nontargeted responses cannot be understood in the framework of DNA-centric radiobiological models; what is