Development of rapid cell-targeting system using focusing heavy-ion microbeam

Funayama, Tomoo; Yokota, Yuichiro; Sakashita, Tetsuya; Suzuki, Michiyo; Kobayashi, Yasuhiko

To explore the single ion hit effect of heavy-ion the cells, we established a method to detect focusing beam spot under the microscopy, and carried out an irradiation of cells by moving cells to the position of focusing beam spot one by one. However, according to the speed limitation of the mechanical stage, the throughput of the irradiation is still comparable with that of the collimating system. To improve the throughput, we next carried out a development of a method to irradiate cells with a scanned beam. The HeLa cells were inoculated on a CR-39 film, and irradiated with scanned neon microbeam. After irradiation, the hit positions of the ion were visualized as etched pits, and the cells were stained with the -H2AX antibody. We found the correspondence of the distribution pattern of the etch pits, the cell positions and the -H2AX foci. Thus we concluded that the developed method can irradiate cells rapidly and accurately with the focusing heavy-ion microbeam.