Theory and Calculation of Stopping Cross Sections of Nucleobases for Swift Ions - Radiation Damage in Biomolecular Systems - page 199

12.6 Conclusions

The question of whether it would be possible to irradiate a biological material with
an ion beam, and tune the beam such that only specific components of the target
biomaterial would be affected is interesting. However, the calculations reported
above indicate that water, amino acids and nucleobases, and by extension most
biomaterials, will absorb energy from swift ions in roughly the same manner. Thus
it would seem impossible to selectively deposit energy in biological materials by
direct hits by fast ions.
It is important to note that direct hits of swift ions on biomolecules is only one of
several ways that fast ion radiation can lead to damage of biomaterials. For example,
most of the damage done to cellular DNA results from attack of radicals produced
from water which fragments on collision with fast ions [ 1 , 2 ]. Thus, even though
molecules such as water and formaldehyde have similar mean excitation energies

eV [ 13 ], they fragment in quite different ways
[ 41 , 42 ], leading to different damage patterns in the biomaterial.

I H 2 O
0

CH 2 O
0

D 72:2 eV I I D 71:4

Acknowledgments This work was supported by the Danish Center for Scientific Computing
(DCSC), the Carlsberg Foundation and the Danish Natural Science Research Council/The Danish
Councils for Independent Research (Grant No. 272-08-0486).

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