|
Fast Monte Carlo Damage Simulation (MCDS) Purdue University, School of Health Sciences, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2051 About The passage of ionizing radiation through living organisms initiates physical and chemical processes that create clusters of damaged nucleotides within one or two turns of the DNA. These clusters are widely considered an important initiating event for the induction of other biological endpoints, including cell killing and neoplastic transformation. The fast Monte Carlo damage simulation (MCDS) algorithm provides a very fast quasi-phenomenological method to interpolate damage yields from computationally expensive, but more detailed, track-structure simulations. The MCDS provides information about the overall yield of SSB, DSB and sites of multiple base damage for electrons, protons and alpha particles with energies as high as ~ 1 GeV. The MCDS can also be used to estimate damage yields for a wide range of photon energies (see Hsiao and Stewart 2008) The MCDS also provides information about the predicted characteristics of various classes of DNA damage, such as the average number of lesions per DNA damage cluster and the average cluster length in base pairs. Details of the MCDS algorithm are described in Semenenko and Stewart (2004, 2006). |
-
Y Hsiao and R.D. Stewart, Monte Carlo Simulation of DNA Damage Induction by X-rays and Selected Radioisotopes. Phys. Med. Biol. 53, 233-244 (2008)
-
V.A. Semenenko and R.D. Stewart. Fast Monte Carlo simulation of DNA damage formed by electrons and light ions. Phys. Med. Biol. 51(7), 1693-1706 (2006).
-
V.A. Semenenko and R.D. Stewart. A fast Monte Carlo algorithm to simulate the spectrum of DNA damages formed by ionizing radiation. Radiat Res. 161(4), 451-457 (2004).
Availability of the Monte Carlo Damage Simulation (MCDS) Software
An executable of MCDS software (version 2.01, March 2006) is freely available for commercial, educational or research purposes. Inquiries about the MCDS program and related software should be directed to Dr. Rob Stewart at trebor@purdue.edu.
-
ReadMe.txt file
-
MS Windows executable and sample files (200 kbyte zip file)
-
Linux (on Intel) executable and sample files (244 kbyte zip file)
-
Sample input file (mcds.inp)
-
Sample output file (mcds.out)
Related Software
-
Monte Carlo Excision Repair (MCER) software. Generates repair outcomes for selected low and high-LET radiations (uses MCDS program to generate damage configurations). Repair outcomes that can be predicted with the MCER program include probability of correct repair (original base sequence restored), the probability a base substitution occurs, the probability a cluster is converted to a double strand break through excision repair, and the number of repair cycles needed to completely remove all of the lesions forming a cluster.
-
Virtual Cell (VC) radiobiology software. Damage repair kinetics, cell killing, neoplastic cell transformation and related quantities (e.g., TCP) for any type of exposure scenario, including split-dose experiments, multi-fraction radiation treatments and brachytherapy exposure scenarios.
Acknowledgement
Research supported in part by the Office of Science (BER), U.S.
Department of Energy, Grant Nos.
DE-FG02-03ER63541 and DE-FG02-03ER63665.
U.S. Department of Energy, Low Dose Radiation Research Program. Science in Support of Radiation Risk Policy.