Abstract #4988

Measuring the Relaxivity of the Superoxide Radical

Martin John MacKinnon^1,2,3,4, Bruce Berkowitz^5,6, and Yen-Yu Ian Shih^1,2,3,4

¹Center for Animal MRI, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, ²Biomedical Research Imaging Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, ³Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, ⁴Department of Neurology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, United States, ⁵Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Wayne State School of Medicine, Detroit, MI, United States, ⁶Department of Ophthalmology, Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, MI, United States

The excessive production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), is commonly thought to be a pathogenic factor in a range of neurodegerative diseases, psychological conditions and in the etiology of aging. Traditionally, ROS have been thought undetectable in-vivo, due to their short half-life and low concentrations in living tissue. The paramagnetism of ROS may provide a means of encoding oxidative stress into MRI data. To investigate how different concentrations of ROS contribute to MRI signals, the T1 relaxivity of ROS must be determined. Using a novel method to detect ROS in-vivo, QUEST-MRI, we show that the relaxivity of the superoxide radical is in the range between 0.135-0.509 LmM^-1s^-1 - similar to nitroxides used as contrast agents to detect ROS in EPR.

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