TY - GEN A1 - Bald, Ilko A1 - Kopyra, Janina A1 - Keller, Adrian T1 - On the role of fluoro-substituted nucleosides in DNA radiosensitization for tumor radiation therapy N2 - Gemcitabine (2′,2′-difluorocytidine) is a well-known radiosensitizer routinely applied in concomitant chemoradiotherapy. During irradiation of biological media with high-energy radiation secondary low-energy (<10 eV) electrons are produced that can directly induce chemical bond breakage in DNA by dissociative electron attachment (DEA). Here, we investigate and compare DEA to the three molecules 2′-deoxycytidine, 2′-deoxy-5-fluorocytidine, and gemcitabine. Fluorination at specific molecular sites, i.e., nucleobase or sugar moiety, is found to control electron attachment and subsequent dissociation pathways. The presence of two fluorine atoms at the sugar ring results in more efficient electron attachment to the sugar moiety and subsequent bond cleavage. For the formation of the dehydrogenated nucleobase anion, we obtain an enhancement factor of 2.8 upon fluorination of the sugar, whereas the enhancement factor is 5.5 when the nucleobase is fluorinated. The observed fragmentation reactions suggest enhanced DNA strand breakage induced by secondary electrons when gemcitabine is incorporated into DNA. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - paper 167 KW - low-energy electrons KW - single-strand breaks KW - gas-phase KW - chemoradiation therapy KW - molecular-mechanisms KW - resonant formation KW - damage KW - attachment KW - drugs Y1 - 2014 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-73412 SP - 6825 EP - 6829 ER - TY - GEN A1 - Ebel, Kenny A1 - Bald, Ilko T1 - Length and Energy Dependence of Low-Energy Electron-Induced Strand Breaks in Poly(A) DNA T2 - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe N2 - The DNA in living cells can be effectively damaged by high-energy radiation, which can lead to cell death. Through the ionization of water molecules, highly reactive secondary species such as low-energy electrons (LEEs) with the most probable energy around 10 eV are generated, which are able to induce DNA strand breaks via dissociative electron attachment. Absolute DNA strand break cross sections of specific DNA sequences can be efficiently determined using DNA origami nanostructures as platforms exposing the target sequences towards LEEs. In this paper, we systematically study the effect of the oligonucleotide length on the strand break cross section at various irradiation energies. The present work focuses on poly-adenine sequences (d(A₄), d(A₈), d(A₁₂), d(A₁₆), and d(A₂₀)) irradiated with 5.0, 7.0, 8.4, and 10 eV electrons. Independent of the DNA length, the strand break cross section shows a maximum around 7.0 eV electron energy for all investigated oligonucleotides confirming that strand breakage occurs through the initial formation of negative ion resonances. When going from d(A₄) to d(A₁₆), the strand break cross section increases with oligonucleotide length, but only at 7.0 and 8.4 eV, i.e., close to the maximum of the negative ion resonance, the increase in the strand break cross section with the length is similar to the increase of an estimated geometrical cross section. For d(A₂₀), a markedly lower DNA strand break cross section is observed for all electron energies, which is tentatively ascribed to a conformational change of the dA₂₀ sequence. The results indicate that, although there is a general length dependence of strand break cross sections, individual nucleotides do not contribute independently of the absolute strand break cross section of the whole DNA strand. The absolute quantification of sequence specific strand breaks will help develop a more accurate molecular level understanding of radiation induced DNA damage, which can then be used for optimized risk estimates in cancer radiation therapy. T3 - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe - 814 KW - DNA origami KW - DNA radiation damage KW - DNA strand breaks KW - low-energy electrons KW - sequence dependence Y1 - 2020 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-444125 SN - 1866-8372 IS - 814 ER -