Clustering of irradiated cells due to the bystander effect

Abstract

For quite some time, it has been observed that cells become irradiated despite the fact that no charged particle has ever directly traversed them. This is known as the radiation-induced bystander effect (RIBE). Because RIBE can be characterized as a Markov branching process, some degree of clustering can be expected to occur. By removing the influence of cell positioning on the formation of cancer clusters, we determine that alone, RIBE has a weak, yet non-negligible effect on cluster formation.