
Tasmanian Devils Developing Resistance to Transmissible Cancer - smb06
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/46907/title/Tasmanian-Devils-Developing-Resistance-to-Transmissible-Cancer/
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TheSpiceIsLife
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.

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happy_tentacles
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?

~~~
maxerickson
The DNA didn't adjust, the population changed.

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

~~~
happy_tentacles
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](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.

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

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

[http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-famous-
tumors/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/update-famous-tumors/)

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

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sp332
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.

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

~~~
DiffEq
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.

~~~
adwn
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.

