A powerful antiradiation compound revealed by a new high-throughput screening method

We present a new high-throughput screening method for the selection of powerful water-soluble antiradiation compounds. This method, which uses conventional immunoassay techniques, allowed the capacity of a given compound to protect thymidine from irradiation to be evaluated. By applying this assay to an antioxidant library, we showed for the first time that norbadione A, a well-known mushroom pigment, has pronounced atypical antiradiation properties.