Focusing heavy-ion microbeam system of JAEA-Takasaki

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

The focusing heavy-ion microbeam system of JAEA-Takasaki can focus heavy-ion beam to minimum one micrometer in vacuum. Using the system, irradiation of HeLa cells were carried out. The cells were stained with CellTracker Orange fluorescent dye and inoculated on a film of ion track detector, CR39. The positions of each target cell were extracted from the fluorescent cell image using image analysis code. To irradiate cells with scanned beam, we developed a code that calculates a set of beam scanner voltages from the extracted cell positions. After irradiation, the hit positions of the ion were visualized as the 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 these developed equipment, codes and methods have sufficient performance to irradiate cells rapidly and accurately with the focusing heavy-ion microbeam.