| Radiation effects, such as bystander effects, hyper radiosensitivity/induced radioresistance (HRS/IRR) and adaptive response that are not related to direct DNA damage are now accepted. However the inter-relationship between them and the possible impact on the scientific basis for radiation protection are highly controversial. This thesis attempts to elucidate the mechanisms of some of these well known but little understood effects. Each paper examines some aspect of bystander effects, adaptive responses and HRS/IRR in an effort to understand how they vary with cell type, dose and time of exposure to single or multiple doses. All the effects involve non-linear dose effect curves and are mainly evident following low doses. Overall findings of the thesis include (1) A clear difference was observed between radioresistant, tumorigenic cell lines with mutant p53 gene expression, and radiosensitive, more normal, cell lines with wild type p53. In general death inducing bystander responses are induced in normal cell populations exposed to low doses of radiation while survival inducing IRR and adaptive responses are seen in the radioresistant tumorigenic cell lines. (2) A cohort of fish cell lines which demonstrated survival promoting bystander effects, also did not show a protective adaptive responses. (3) Adaptive responses traditionally occur when a large challenge dose is given 4--6hrs following low (10--100mGy) priming doses but this thesis shows that for the epithelial cell lines tested, the size of the priming dose (range 0.1--2Gy) does not appear to alter the size of the recovery response. Additionally increased survival could be detected in some cases when the challenge dose was given within one hour of the priming dose. The overall conclusion is that cell lines induce either a bystander response or a protective/adaptive response depending on genetic background and other factors. Care is needed in the interpretation of data generated from only one or two cell lines and in the extrapolation of mechanistic ideas based on one or two cell lines to other cell types or to the in vivo situation. |
