After 10 years of activity, about 300 patients have been treated at the CATANA Eye Protontherapy facility. A 62 MeV proton beam produced by a Superconducting Cyclotron is dedicated to radiotherapy of eye lesions, as uveal melanomas. Research and development work has been done to test different dosimetry devices to be used for reference and relative dosimetry, in order to achieve dose delivering accuracy. The follow-up results on 220 demonstrated the efficacy of proton beams and encouraged us in our activity in the fight against cancer.

Networks of transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulators are critical for bacterial survival and adaptation to environmental stressors. While transcriptional regulators provide rapid activation and/or repression of a wide-network of genes, post-transcriptional regulators, such as small RNAs (sRNAs), are also important to fine-tune gene expression. However, the mechanisms of sRNAs remain poorly understood, especially in less-studied bacteria. Deinococcus radiodurans is a gram-positive bacterium resistant to extreme levels of ionizing radiation (IR). Although multiple unique regulatory systems (e.g., the Radiation and Desiccation Response (RDR)) have been identified in this organism, the role of post-transcriptional regulators has not been characterized within the IR response. In this study, we have characterized an sRNA, PprS (formerly Dsr2), as a post-transcriptional coordinator of IR recovery in D. radiodurans. PprS showed differential expression specifically under IR and knockdown of PprS resulted in reduced survival and growth under IR, suggesting its importance in regulating post-radiation recovery. We determined a number of potential RNA targets involved in several pathways including translation and DNA repair. Specifically, we confirmed that PprS binds within the coding region to stabilize the pprM (DR_0907) transcript, a RDR modulator. Overall, these results are the first to present an additional layer of sRNA-based control in DNA repair pathways associated with bacterial radioresistance.