African elephants have more copies of gene that help to resist cancer
Neil Aldridge / Nature Pictice Library / Alamy
The larger animals are longer and can have more cells, so we would expect more risk to develop cancer. 263 It is a comprehensive analysis of species, in fact, as this is why some large animals evolve ways to stop the risk.
“We allows the first empirical evidence to show that the association between body size and cancer prevalence, which is more likely to get more cancer than smaller species,” says George Butler University College in London.
The results found in advance of the previous exams There is no link between body mass and cancer tariffs. But many of them are involved in just a dozen species, Butler says.
For a broader view, Butler and his colleagues studied data related to 79 birds, 90 mammals, 63 reptiles and 31 amphibian data. These data came from other researchers, captured animals, zoos and aquariums were maintained through autopsy records.
The group found that the larger animals were slightly more compared to the smallest dead. Among the birds and mammals, the mass mass rate of 1% increase was 0.1% according to the rate of cancer. The mass data data was not available for reptiles and amphibians, so the team used the body length, found that the average increase in the average increase in the average increase in the average increase.
Butler and his team said that the discovery is known as Peto’s paradox, which indicated that cancer rates need to relate to the body size, but not. On the other hand, Vera Gorbunova University of the University of New York, still the weakness of correlation requires an explanation.
“The increase in danger they see is very low, and it is not at all proportional to the size of the body,” he explains. “If you take a small animal like the mouse, it is 100 times higher, or an elephant is 1000 times higher, 100 times higher than humble, or 1000 times higher in the elephan.”
The larger species suggests that more ways to protect himself, Gorbunova says.
In fact, evolutionary trees to conclude the evolution of the size of the animal’s body, the team discovered that similar size birds and mammal species had better defenses against cancer, if they increased the size of its evolution.
Previous studies have been determined by genetic adaptations elephant and whales It can protect against cancer by improving DNA repair or distributing defective cells.
Some animals resisting animals against cancer can lead to new therapies for people, says Gorbunova. “Therefore, in animal-resistant animals, there are also particular biological paths that are placed in different ways, for example, we would also design small molecules that would guide these avenues, killing the cancer in more efficiently,” he says cancer.
“It is likely that having very promising drugs, in evolution, these mechanisms have been tested for millions of years,” he noted.
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