The advancement of multidisciplinary research fields dealing with ionising radiation induced biological damage – radiobiology, radiation physics, radiation protection and, in particular, medical physics – requires a clear mechanistic understanding of how cellular damage is induced by ionising radiation. Monte Carlo (MC) simulations provide a promising approach for the mechanistic simulation of radiation transport and radiation chemistry, towards the in silico simulation of early biological damage. We have recently developed a fully integrated MC simulation that calculates early single strand breaks (SSBs) and double strand breaks (DSBs) in a fractal chromatin based human cell nucleus model. The results of this simulation are almost equivalent to past MC simulations when considering direct/indirect strand break fraction, DSB yields and fragment distribution. The simulation results agree with experimental data on DSB yields within 13.6% on average and fragment distributions agree within an average of 34.8%.@en

The authors regret having incorrectly written in equation (7) that the fraction of surviving cells (SF) is obtained using the natural logarithm of the negative value of the number of lethal lesions Lf. The natural logarithm must be replaced by the exponential function as follows: [Formula presented] Although the equation is incorrectly written in the paper, its correct expression has been used in the results of the analysis shown in Figure 4. This error has no impact on the other results and conclusions of the paper. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.@en