Abstract
Being the main cause of cancer, almost all chemical carcinogens are strong electrophiles, that is, they have a high affinity for the electron. We have shown that positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS) is able to detect chemical carcinogens by their inhibition of positronium (Ps) formation in liquid media. Electrophilic carcinogens intercept thermalized track electrons, which are precursors of Ps, and as a result, when they are present Ps atom does not practically form. Available biophysical data seemingly indicate that frozen solutions model better an intracellular medium than the liquid ones. So it is reasonable to use emission Mössbauer spectroscopy (EMS) to detect chemical carcinogens, measuring the yield of 57Fe2+ions formed in reactions of Auger electrons and other secondary electrons they produced with 57Fe3+. These reactions are similar to the Ps formation process in the terminal part the positron track: e++ e− =>Ps. So EMS and PALS are complementary methods for detection of carcinogenic compounds.
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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Proceedings of the International Conference on the Applications of the Mössbauer Effect (ICAME 2017), Saint-Petersburg, Russia, 3-8 September 2017
Edited by Valentin Semenov
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Bokov, A.V., Byakov, V.M., Kulikov, L.A. et al. To the application of the emission Mössbauer and positron annihilation spectroscopies for detection of carcinogens. Hyperfine Interact 238, 95 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10751-017-1455-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10751-017-1455-1