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Nuclear track analysis: a method for quantitation and localization of fissionable elements in 3D samples
Premo, Virginia L.
Premo, Virginia L.
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2023
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Abstract
Actinides are chemically and radiologically toxic elements, which have relevance in nuclear power, space exploration, medicine, and defense. One actinide, plutonium (Pu), is of great interest for biochemical studies because it is not easily excreted from mammals and, over time, the radioactivity of Pu in a person or animal can cause cancers. In vivo methods for studying Pu biochemistry are challenging due to the amounts of Pu required by current detection methods being too radiotoxic for the cells during the exposure time. In this work, nuclear track analysis (NTA) was used to detect Pu by imaging the paths of fission fragments emanating from Pu containing 3D samples (PC-12 Adh mammalian cells incubated in vitro) that were immobilized on 2D solid state nuclear track detectors (SSNTDs). The use of morphologically similar standards made by encapsulating serial dilutions of known quantities of Pu in giant unilamellar vesicles (GUVs) was used to obtain a detection efficiency curve for Pu in varying sizes of vesicles by the SSNTD. The fractional detection efficiency of the smallest sizes of GUVs was an order of magnitude higher than 1, but it dropped to a plateau near 0.2 as the GUV sizes increased. The serial dilutions were used to obtain a calibration curve for fission tracks per GUV per µm2 for Pu concentrations (10, 1, 0.1, and 0.05) µM. The calibration curves were used to calculate the amount of Pu taken up by PC-12 Adh cells incubated in 0.2 µM transferrin bound Pu, which was 0.14 µM Pu per cell, or 7.4 attograms Pu per cell (~19000 atoms of Pu). The NTA method was also used in this work to map the Pu locations within the cell by adding a second SSNTD to sandwich the sample and detect both fission fragments. However, the SSNTD pairs were unable to be aligned to such a fine detail that the fission fragment pairs can be found. Further development of SSNTD manufacturing is needed for precise realignment and further testing of this technique.
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