The potential use of biogas producing microorganisms in radiation protection

Radiation induced injury is a limiting factor in radiation related approaches from earth to space. Inductions of a wide spectrum of damages in radiotherapy patients due to unwanted normal tissues irradiation and space radiation related diseases in astronauts have been caused many limitations in cancer treatment and space missions. There are many radiation protection/ mitigation approaches including: physical, chemical, biological and physiological methods. Radiation protection using these methods is expensive and also has many problems including acute toxicities and difficulties in their targeting to normal tissues. Based on experimental and hypothetical data, showing that medical/ biological gases have many protective effects such as antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-apoptotic, and induction of radioresistance, we hypothesize that similar gases which have been produced by microorganisms (biogases) have those properties and may be used as radiation mitigators/ protectors in radiation related approaches such as radiotherapy, radiation accidents and in space missions. Isolation microorganism in safe laboratory conditions in enough amounts, finding non-toxic dose of microorganisms that provide highest radioprotection percent, dose reduction factor (DRF) calculation to compare the radioprotective efficacy of the microorganisms, finding the best targeting techniques to deliver those microorganisms into normal tissues, genetically manipulations of microorganism to achieve the highest amount of biogases with lowest side effects can be done for testing the hypothesis. (C) 2015 Tehran University of Medical Sciences. Published by Elsevier Ltd.