A main subject of modern experiments in radiobiology is the detailed investigation of the biological response on a microscopic scale when a living organism is irradiated by ionizing radiation. As known for long, a DNA double strand break (DSB) is one of the most harmful threats that can be induced by ionizing radiation (Figure 1a). Thus, the response of cells to DSBs on a microscopic scale interests in view of cell surveillance strategies. There are already a lot of proteins known that are omnipresent in cell nuclei and that are involved in the repair of DSBs. Some of them cluster around a DSB forming a “repair focus” (Figure 1b). The spatio-temporal development of the repair processes and the interaction of the different proteins within repair pathways are to a large extent still unknown. A precise irradiation of cells by means of a nuclear microprobe, for example, using SNAKE ( S uperconducting N anoscope for A pplied nuclear ( K ern-) physics E xperiments) at the Munich tandem accelerator, is an ideal tool to perform accurate radiobiological experiments and to investigate cell surveillance strategies in general [1].    «

A main subject of modern experiments in radiobiology is the detailed investigation of the biological response on a microscopic scale when a living organism is irradiated by ionizing radiation. As known for long, a DNA double strand break (DSB) is one of the most harmful threats that can be induced by ionizing radiation (Figure 1a). Thus, the response of cells to DSBs on a microscopic scale interests in view of cell surveillance strategies. There are already a lot of proteins known that are omnip...    »