Page 7 - IAV Digital Magazine #588

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
Chernobyl's Mutant Wolves
Appear To Have Developed
Resistance To Cancer, Study Finds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PdXoJyB1U8
By Tom Gillespie
Mutant wolves roaming the deserted streets of Chernobyl appear to have developed resistance to cancer - raising hopes the findings can help scientists fight the disease in humans.
A nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine in 1986
- with more than 100,000 people evacuated from the city as the blast released cancer-causing radiation.
The area has remained eerily abandoned ever since, with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) put in place to prevent people
from entering a 1,000- square-mile area where the radiation still poses a can- cer risk.
Humans may not have returned, but wildlife such as wolves and horses roam the wastelands of the evac- uated city more than 35 years after the disaster.
Dr Cara Love, an evolution- ary biologist and ecotoxicol- ogist at Princeton University in the US, has been study- ing how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite gen- erations of exposure to radioactive particles.
Dr Love and a team of researchers visited the CEZ in 2014 and put radio col-
lars on the wolves so that their movements could be monitored.
She said the collars give the team "real-time meas- urements of where [the wolves] are and how much [radiation] they are exposed to".
They also took blood sam- ples to understand how the wolves' bodies respond to cancer-causing radiation.
The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives - which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human.
Dr Love found the wolves have altered immune sys- tems similar to cancer patients undergoing radia- tion treatment, but more significantly she also identi- fied specific parts of the animals' genetic information that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk.
A lot of research in humans has found mutations that increase cancer risk - with the presence of the variant BRCA gene making it more likely a woman might devel- op breast or ovarian cancer, for example.
But Dr Love's work has sought to identify protective mutations that increase the odds of surviving cancer.
The pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine have prevented Dr Love and her collaborators from returning to the CEZ in recent years.
She said: "Our priority is for people and collaborators there to be as safe as pos- sible."
Dr Love presented her find- ings at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle, Washington, last month.
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