Biophysical Modelling of DNA fragmentation

The induction of double strand breaks (DBSs) is considered to a severe radiation-induced damage. The investigation of fragment distributions of plasmid DNA after heavy ion irradiation can give insight into the higher fragmentation due to localized energy deposition around ion tracks. In recent years AFM pictures of fragmented supercoiled plasmid DNA were taken and analyzed. In this report, we introduce a numerical model based on the Local Effect Model (1) which predicts the experimental results under consideration of certain constraints of the detection procedure.