Study of strand breaks induced by direct effects of monoenergetic electrons in B conformation of genetic material of living cells by using Geant4

Abstract

In this study, DNA damage and statistics of hit in any compartments of B-DNA conformation of genetic material of living cells, induced by monoenergetic electrons, have been studied using Monte Carlo Geant4 (Geometry and tracking 4)-DNA toolkit. Simple 34 bp segments of B-DNA conformation, repeated randomly in high number, and monoenergetic electrons (1-20 keV) have been simulated in a volume of typical animal cell nucleus. The average yields of single strand and double strand damage for this energy range of electrons were 24.6 Gy-1Gbp-1 and 0.295 Gy-1Gbp-1, respectively. The highest hit efficiency is for phosphodiester volume of B-DNA model and the most single strand break damage yield has been calculated for 8 keV electrons. The averaged DSB to SSB fraction for this energy range electrons is about 0.031.

Keywords

• monoenergetic electrons
• single strand break
• double strand break
• volume model of b-dna
• geant4