Mutated wolves roaming the deserted streets of Chernobyl appear to have developed a resistance to cancer, raising hopes that the findings will help scientists combat the disease in humans.
Nuclear reactor explosion at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine in 1986 – With more than 100 thousand people evacuated from the city The explosion released cancer-causing radiation.
The area has remained eerily deserted ever since, with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) created to prevent people from entering the 1,000-square-mile area where radiation still poses a cancer risk.
Humans may not have returned, but wildlife such as wolves and horses roam the barren lands of the city evacuated more than 35 years after the disaster.
Kara Love, an evolutionary biologist and environmental toxicologist at Princeton University in the US, has been studying how Chernobyl wolves survived despite being exposed to generations of radioactive particles.
Ms. Love and a team of researchers visited the CEZ in 2014 and put radio collars on the wolves so their movements could be monitored.
The collars give the team “real-time measurements of the location,” she said [the wolves] She and how much [radiation] “They are exposed to it.”
They also took blood samples to understand how wolves' bodies respond to cancer-causing radiation.
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A wolf in the forest in Chernobyl. Photo: AP
Researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to more than 11.28 millirem of radiation per day throughout their lives – more than six times the legal safety limit for humans.
Ms. Love found that wolves had altered immune systems similar to cancer patients undergoing radiotherapy, but more importantly, she also identified certain parts of the animals' genetic information that appeared resilient in the face of increased cancer risk.
A lot of research in humans has found mutations that increase cancer risk — with a variant BRCA gene making it more likely that a woman will develop breast or ovarian cancer, for example.
But Ms. Love's work sought to identify protective mutations that increase the odds of surviving cancer.
A brown owl in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Photo: Reuters
The epidemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine Ms Love and her associates have been banned from returning to the European Economic Area in recent years.
“Our priority is that the people and collaborators there are as safe as possible,” she said.
Ms. Love presented her findings at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle, Washington, last month.
