Tasmanian Devils Developing Resistance to Transmissible Cancer | Hacker News Reader

Tasmanian Devils Developing Resistance to Transmissible Cancer

the-scientist.com

67 pointssmb0618 comments

This is great news, these little creatures are adorable, until you watch them feeding, then it sounds like you've entered hell's anteroom.

I live in Tasmania, there's a Tasmanian Devil sanctuary about an hour drive from my house. Something that struck when when listing the the fellow there give his talk was that "300,000 animals die every year on Tasmanian roads" and I thought and they just keep coming! there must be a lot of animals on this little island. So I looked up some numbers and was surprised to discover there are about 25 million kangaroos in Australia, more kangaroos than there are people! I've seen kangaroos taller than I am (and I'm 6 foot) with rippling biceps bigger than mine - it's quite a sight, but never seen a Tasmanian Devil in the wild.

Back to the Devils. They only live about 5 years in the wild, and if you go to the Devil sanctuary enough you'll see they move a bunch of Devils in to a seperate enclosure they call the 'Geriatric Ward' as they live a bit longer in captivity and show visible signs of ageing (mostly hair loss and greying).

I always tell people we should domesticate them, I think they'd make hilarious pets, they've got quite a character, and it'd quickly move them away from being endangered.

While it is a feel good story - that's also a remarkable reminder of how little do we know. Sure, we most likely have few full instances of Tasmanian Devil's DNA (accounting for reading errors that is). This just tells me how far off we are from actual understanding how this machinery adjusted to the external threat.

Drawing a parallel with software stack -> we invented it and there are very few of us (sure as hell not me) that would understand a full stack of the browser and its environment I am currently using. Now faced with a large trove of DNA data - we know it works. Stationary we could show how a particular part affects a particular protein production. The full on rolling in-vivo interactions are way beyond the reach - reverse engineering them proves quite a challenge.

Would life be akin to running a code that keeps data and states in the code itself, continuing running itself though the changed code?

Anybody here is cracking an interesting biotechnological problem with a fancy software stack - one that could be shared for a good story?

The DNA didn't adjust, the population changed.

The population changed because the individuals least susceptible to the cancer reproduced more.

Yeap, in case of Tasmanian Devils you are right.

I made a a large swooping statement and had this in mind -> http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n1/full/nn.3594.html

When I read it the first time if blew my mind. In principle - traumatic memories developed in presence of a particular scent triggered responses in subsequent generations - without the generations entering into social contact (a case of a female mouse to its offspring). Don't know how well established is statistics in this study though and how well replicated was the study. It suggests a storage of the information beyond central nervous system - in mammalian sperm.

Can you say that for certain in this case? In particular, any time you sequence a population, you see a large number of "novel" SNPs (or collections of SNPs), where the mutations were introduced in the germline of the parent and inherited, but weren't present in the parent's somatic cell line. And that's exactly what they saw in this paper. So I'm not certain you can claim that the DNA didn't adjust (rather, that natural mutations didn't contribute to the survivor's higher reproduction rate).

Computer system and SW are constantly evolving.

Each new version of Chrome, Firefox, IE are SW evolutions. So are all new versions of iOS, Android OSx, Linux, Windows.

They are evolving to add new features, defense against new attacks.

Maybe, just maybe "SW, System" are "Intelligent Design" and programmers are the "Intelligent"? :-)

Maybe they co-evolve, with cancer becoming less deadly as it means that it can spread faster by using its host indefinitely.

There's a fantastic Radiolab episode about tumors that talks about the discovery of this cancer:

http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-famous-tumors/

Nice news. Do we find something helpful from their resistance?

So... The "rapid evolutionary response" was just for all the vulnerable ones to die off? That doesn't really seem like a response.

Edit: I don't see anything "rapid" happening either, except maybe the remaining members of the species procreating fast enough to not go extinct.

That's how evolution works, isn't it?

Usually, there is just a higher rate of non-reproduction in the less fit individuals, rather than wholesale death, but yeah, that is how evolution works.

evolution is so discriminatory

No, that is how Natural Selection works, not Evolution. This is a demonstration of natural selection, as the resistance was already resident in the DNA. Natural Selection != Evolution.

Natural selection is a crucial component of evolution.

> This is a demonstration of natural selection, as the resistance was already resident in the DNA.

It doesn't matter which came first, the external pressure or the genetic trait. In both cases it's evolution.

To select you need to have options to select from.

Natural selection is a major component of evolution. The other is mutation, which produces the variation that natural selection operates on.

The paper specifically based its analysis on SNPs, a large fraction of which are novel mutations that did not exist in preexisting fixed alleles.

This is exactly how evolution works though. The genetic makeup of an individual organism doesn't change according to its environment. Only the offspring can have different genetic makeup which can be for better or for worse - this is where natural selection comes into play.

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