The Radiological Research Accelerator Facility (RARAF),[1] located on the Columbia University Nevis Laboratories campus in Irvington, New York is a National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering biotechnology resource center (P41)[2] specializing in microbeam technology.
Their aim was to provide a source of monoenergetic neutrons designed and operated specifically for studies in radiation biology, dosimetry, and microdosimetry.
RARAF operated at BNL from 1967 until 1980, when it was dismantled to make room for the ISABELLE project, a very large accelerator which was never completed.
The U.S. Department of Energy provided funds to move RARAF to Nevis Laboratories and reassemble it in a new multi-level facility constructed within the cyclotron building.
In 2006 the Van de Graaff was replaced by a 5 MV Singletron from High Voltage Engineering Europa (HVEE) in the Netherlands.
[4] In order to further reduce targeting time, and making use of the fact that a focused microbeam, unlike a collimated one, is not restricted to a single location on the accelerator exit window, we have implemented a magnetic-coil-based fast deflector, placed between the two quadrupole triplets, that allows deflecting the beam to any position in the field of view of the microscope used to observe the cells during irradiation.
The higher spatial resolution achievable with modern state-of-the-art x-ray optics elements combined with the localized damage produced by the absorption of low energy photons (~1 keV) represents a unique tool to investigate the radio-sensitivity of sub-cellular and eventually sub-nuclear targets.
More recently due to the significance of the extracellular environment and technological developments, studies involving 3D tissue systems,[5][6] including living organisms,[7] have become more common.
The precision control and manipulation of fluids and biological materials afforded by microfluidics are ideal to interface with the microbeam.
[10] The device avoids the use of anesthetics that might interfere with normal physiological processes by capturing the C. elegans worms in tapered microfluidic channels.