Abstract
The optical technique based on the measurement of delayed luminescence emitted from the biological samples has demonstrated its ability to provide valid and predictive information on the functional status of various biological systems. We want to extend this technique to study the effect of ionizing radiation on biological systems. In particular we are interested in the action of ion beams, used for therapeutic purposes or to increase the biological diversity. In general, the assessment of the damage that radiation produces both in the target objects and in the surrounding tissues, requires considerable time because is based on biochemical analysis or on the examination of the evolution of the irradiated systems. The delayed luminescence technique could help to simplify this investigation. We have so started our studies performing irradiations of some relatively simple vegetable models. In this paper we report results obtained from mung bean (Vigna radiata) seeds submitted to a 12C ion beam at the energy of 62 MeV/nucleon. The dry seeds were irradiated at doses from 50 to 7000 Gy. The photoinduced delayed luminescence of each seed before and after ion irradiation was measured. The growth of seedlings after irradiation was compared with that of untreated seeds. A growth reduction on increasing the dose was registered. The results show strong correlations between the ion irradiation dose, seeds growth and delayed luminescence intensity. In particular, the delayed luminescence intensity is correlated by a logistic function to the seedlings elongation and, after performing a suitable measurement campaign based on blind tests, it could become a tool able to predict the growth of seeds after ion irradiation. Moreover these results demonstrate that measurements of delayed luminescence could be used as a fast and non-invasive technique to check the effects of ion beams on relatively simple biological systems.
Highlights
In recent years the treatment of biological systems via ion beams has opened new opportunities in some important applicative fields, in particular in cancer treatments [1,2,3] and in enhancement of biological diversity, obtained by inducing mutations in seeds [4,5,6,7]
The mung bean seeds irradiated by ion beams exhibited a very high resistance to radiation damages
Even if one supposes that the delayed luminescence (DL) is connected to the crystal volume by a power law with slope equal to 0.33, by considering the nonlinear dependence of crystal volume on dose, it results reasonable that the correlation between DL and dose is expressed by a power law, having a slope of the order of 0.25. These results suggest that, even in the case of seeds, the ion irradiation produces a decrease in the volume of the organized structures inside the seed and DL from seeds gives information on the evolution of its structural organization
Summary
In recent years the treatment of biological systems via ion beams has opened new opportunities in some important applicative fields, in particular in cancer treatments [1,2,3] and in enhancement of biological diversity, obtained by inducing mutations in seeds [4,5,6,7]. The techniques used to obtain information on the status of the treated systems are characterized by high invasiveness, long times and high costs. An early non-invasive diagnostic technique, capable to give information on the status of the treated systems, would be welcome. The increasing sensitivity of recent optical techniques allows the development of non-invasive tools to explore the state of biological systems. Photons are able to probe the chemistry and the physical structure of biological systems, providing information useful to disentangle their complexity. For these reasons, optical techniques, as fluorescence or reflectance spectroscopy, have been applied in various fields [14,15,16,17]
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