A natural products chemist looks at the bystander effect!

The bystander effect is a process whereby the medium in which cells are irradiated at very low levels is presumed to contain a “low molecular weight” entity that will induce cell death and/or genetic changes in fresh mammalian cells when they are incubated in the medium. Following discussions at a recent meeting in McMaster University, suggestions are made in this paper as to the possibility for the “entity” to be nitric oxide and recommendations are given as to methods that will permit a systematic (bio)chemical search to be performed in order to identify the “activator” and prove/disprove the hypothesis.