Radiation, such as X-rays and gamma rays, at low doses do not damage the DNA: on the contrary, they make it more resistant in case of exposure to high doses of radiation, avoiding the breakdown of chromosomes.
This was revealed by an Italian study done on fruit flies, coordinated by Sapienza University of Rome and published in the journal Communications Biology, which also identified for the first time the gene responsible for this protective response.
The research, conducted in collaboration with the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Iss), the University of Padua and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn), could also clarify the radioresistance phenomena observed in many tumors, given that the identified gene is also present in human beings. humans.
Understanding the effects associated with low doses of radiation is of significant importance from a social point of view, precisely because of the continuous exposure to which we are subjected daily, during work, medical examinations and frequent air travel.
Now, researchers led by Antonella Porrazzo have shown that chronic exposure of the common fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) to low doses of radiation during development makes the cells of this organism resistant to chromosome breakage, a typical damage to DNA. instead at high doses of gamma rays.
The researchers also sequenced the RNA (the single-stranded molecule implicated in various biological roles of coding, decoding, regulating and expressing genes) of the flies used in the experiment: the results show that the 'radio adaptive' response, which results that is protective at low doses of radiation, it is due in particular to a gene, called Loquacious, which is also found in humans.
In resistant flies, the gene is less active, a feature that is also passed on to subsequent generations.
