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Student of FCT NOVA, in the PHD program RaBBiT, publishes in the prestigious Nature Communications

04-06-2019

Rebecca Meissner,  PhD at FCT NOVA and at University of Innsbruck, Austria, has published an article in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

This journal, of high Impact Factor (12,124 in 2018), maintains a leading position among journals in all natural sciences areas. The carefully selected articles report the latest scientific discoveries and advances worldwide in the areas of Physical Sciences, Earth Sciences and Environment, Biological Sciences and Health Sciences.

The article "Low-energy electrons transform the nimorazole molecule into a radiosensitiser", now available to all interested parties, is coauthored by the student and Paulo Limão-Vieira, FCT NOVA Professor and researcher at the CEFITEC research center.

In radiotherapeutic procedures, the action of secondary electrons is of vital importance to determine the chemical processes that occur in physiological environment and in this way determine the viability of certain mechanisms in specific functions in the oncological pathologies treatment process. This article describes for the first time the mechanism of reduction of a molecular species with potential of use in processes of radiotherapy, in isolated and hydrated conditions, thus allowing a description of the molecular mechanisms that make it a potential radiosensitizer. This study allows a better understanding of the interaction processes of secondary electrons with these molecular species with relevance to the areas of physics, biophysics, biomedical, bionanotechnology or biomedicine.

The student participates in the RaBBiT doctoral program, which currently has more than 30 students enrolled in PhD work at FCT NOVA and partner institutions in the UK, Spain and Austria.