The Action of Caffeine on X-Irradiated HeLa Cells. II. Synergistic Lethality

Postirradiation treatment of HeLa S3 cells with 1 mM caffeine results in a marked diminution of the surviving fraction as scored by colony formation. The decrease is dose dependent; the effect of a 24-hour postirradiation treatment of a nonsynchronous population with caffeine is to change the terminal slope of the survival curve and its intercept. D0 is reduced from 130 to 60 rad; the extrapolation number is increased about twofold. The amount of postirradiation killing is maximal if cells are exposed to caffeine at a concentration of at least 1 mM for 8 hours; less than 10% of unirradiated cells are killed under these conditions. Dose-response curves were also obtained for synchronous cells at various phases of the cell cycle. Similar results were obtained at all cell ages, but the magnitude of the effect is age dependent. This age dependence was further explored in experiments in which mitotically collected cells were exposed to 300 or 500 rad doses at 2-hour intervals throughout the cell cycle. Treatme...