Modelling dissociative dynamics of biosystems after metastable electron attachment: the sugar backbones

The damage induced by radiation in cells is currently described via low-energy attachment of electrons produced in the biological medium by the primary radiation. Therefore the corresponding metastable anionic states are obtained in this work from multichannel quantum calculations which, in the present study, involve beta-D-ribose and beta-D-deoxyribose molecular fragments from RNA and DNA structures. The scattering attributes associated with the resonant processes are derived from the computed total, elastic cross sections by means of a high-level Breit-Wigner analysis of the calculated phase shifts. The present procedure is shown to provide a powerful tool for extracting the resonance parameters from the scattering data even in the presence of broad, overlapping resonances which typically occur in the resonant dynamics of complicated biosystems after electron attachment effects.