Actinides in Biological Systems

Actinides are elements with atomic numbers between 89 and 103. All actinides are radioactive, heavy elements. Due to their occurrence the can be separated into two groups: Naturally occurring actinides and synthetic elements. However, the line between these two groups is not a sharp one. This is due human activities in use and testing nuclear power and nuclear weapons as well as in a very smaller amount due to natural nuclear reactors in the Proterozoic era. Thorium, protactinium, uranium and in much smaller amounts plutonium are the naturally occurring elements. Neptunium and all elements with atomic numbers (AN) larger than 94 are synthetic elements. The isotopes of elements beginning with einsteinium (AN=99) have relatively short lifetimes of the radioactive decay (< 472d Es-252) and there availability is very limited, therefore no information about their behaviour in biological systems have been published up to now.
Especially uranium, neptunium, plutonium and partly also americium can exist in different oxidation states. Therefore for these elements redox reactions in biological systems are of great significance.
Actinoides can be accumulated in the human body. However, the accumulating organs are different. While protactinium is mainly accumulated in kidneys and bones, plutonium is incorporated in lung, liver and bones. All actinoides show long residence times in the human body. Therefore it is sometimes not easy to distinguish between chemical toxicity and radiotoxicity.
Most of the literature deals with monitoring of radioactivity and calculation of doses in living systems, however, this will be not the focus of this contribution.
Thorium exits in the natural environment only in the oxidation state +4. Therefore it precipitates very easily. Due to this the transfer of thorium from soil to plants is much lower compared to uranium, for instance.
The only long living isotope of protactinium is Pa-231, a member of the U-235 decay chain. Up to now the biology of this element focuses only on the radiometric determination.
The use of depleted uranium in recent years increased the research in the behaviour of this element in biological environments latterly. New results show that due to the comprising coordination chemistry of uranium a change in the coordination of uranium occurs, when uranium is transported to different biological compartments. Additionally a lot of work to study the influence of uranium to microorganism and plants has been done in the past.
The next element in the actinoides series is neptunium. All members of this naturally occurring decay series have been decayed. Only studies with artificial neptunium isotopes have been done. It is known that microorganisms are able to reduce neptunium(V). Also neptunium is able to bond to transferrin and other proteins of the blood plasma.
Due to its high radio toxicity plutonium has been mainly studied with complexing agents as transferrin. Additionally several studies with microorganisms have been performed. Due to the five possible oxidation states the redox behaviour of plutonium in biological systems is of basic interest.
The next elements in the series of actinoides exits mainly in the oxidation state +3. Therefore it can be expected that their biological behaviour is similar. Nevertheless, several examples for americium, curium will be given. Some sorption behaviour of microorganisms towards americium has been published.
For curium the interaction with microorganism has been studied. It should be lined out here that curium shows an extraordinary high fluorescence emission yield, which enables studies at extremely low concentrations of this element down to 10-11 Mol/l. As an example the speciation of curium in human urine (Cm addition to urine) was determined.
No studies for berkelium in biological systems are reported.
Californium has been used as neutron source to irradiate blood lymphocytes.
Several data are available, dealing with questions of the decontamination of inhaled or ingested actinoides into human body.
Lanthanoides (elements of the 4f series) show similar chemical behaviour as actinoides in the same oxidation state.