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Abstract #4988

Measuring the Relaxivity of the Superoxide Radical

Martin John MacKinnon1,2,3,4, Bruce Berkowitz5,6, and Yen-Yu Ian Shih1,2,3,4

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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