Microtubules are one of the three components of the cell cytoskeleton. They are hollow wires, with a diameter of about 25 nm, formed by 13 laterally associated protofilaments composed by dimers of α and β-tubulin. Microtubules are dynamic structures which undergo constant modifications by shrinking and elongating in a phenomenon called treadmilling. Microtubules intervene in various fundamental aspects of the biology of a cell. They contribute to determine the shape of a cell, play a role in the cell movement, and in the intracellular transport of organelles during motion and mitotic chromosome segregation. Despite the relevance of the processes mediated by microtubules most studies on the effects of ionizing radiations focus their attention on the damages delivered to DNA. In this paper we attempt to assess the effects borne by IRs to the microtubules network as a biological target. In this study we irradiated Hs 578Bst cells (a no-cancer, no-immortalized, human breast epithelial cell line) with an 8 Gy single dose of either X-rays or protons. After the irradiated cells fixation, the microtubules were imaged by means of stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy to characterize the network disruption. In our results, Microtubules fibers integrity appears to not have been significantly affected at the administered dose of protons and X-rays, nonetheless we observed differences in the MT network distribution and fiber curvatures.

微管是细胞骨架的三个组成部分之一。它们是直径约25 nm的空心线，由13个由二聚体的二聚体组成的横向相关原丝形成α 和 β-微管蛋白。微管是动态结构，通过收缩和伸长而发生不断的变化，这种现象称为“跑步运动”。微管介入细胞生物学的各个基本方面。它们有助于确定细胞的形状，在运动和有丝分裂染色体分离过程中，在细胞运动以及细胞器的细胞内运输中发挥作用。尽管微管介导的过程具有相关性，但大多数有关电离辐射影响的研究仍将注意力集中在传递给DNA的损伤上。在本文中，我们试图评估红外辐射作为生物靶点对微管网络的影响。在这项研究中，我们用单剂量8 Gy的X射线或质子辐照了Hs 578Bst细胞（无癌，永生化的人乳腺上皮细胞系）。照射细胞固定后，通过随机光学重建显微镜对微管成像，以表征网络破坏。在我们的结果中，在质子和X射线的给药剂量下，微管纤维的完整性似乎并未受到显着影响，尽管如此，我们观察到MT网络分布和纤维曲率的差异。