THE GEANT4-DNA PROJECT

TLDR

The project was initiated by the European Space Agency to predict the deleterious effects of radiation on astronauts during long‑duration space missions and is expected to extend into particle physics, chemistry, and cellular biology within the Geant4 collaboration. The Geant4‑DNA project seeks to develop open‑source simulation software fully integrated into the Geant4 Monte‑Carlo toolkit to model biological damage from ionizing radiation at cellular and sub‑cellular scales. The collaboration presents an overview of the ongoing project, including recent developments incorporated into Geant4 since December 2009 and an example of simulating direct irradiation of a chromatin fiber.

Abstract

The Geant4-DNA project proposes to develop an open-source simulation software based and fully included in the general-purpose Geant4 Monte-Carlo simulation toolkit. The main objective of this software is to simulate biological damages induced by ionizing radiations at the cellular and sub-cellular scale. This project was originally initiated by the European Space Agency for the prediction of the deleterious effects of radiations that may affect astronauts during future long duration space exploration missions. In this paper, the Geant4-DNA collaboration presents an overview of the whole on-going project, including its most recent developments that are available in the Geant4 toolkit since December 2009 (release 9.3), as well as an illustration example simulating the direct irradiation of a biological chromatin fiber. Expected extensions involving several research domains, such as particle physics, chemistry and cellular and molecular biology, within a fully interdisciplinary activity of the Geant4 collaboration are also discussed.