The world’s longest living mammal may owe its longevity to a fix-it superpower.
That’s one way to ward off trouble from damaged DNA, says Marc Tollis, an evolutionary biologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff who did not participate in the new study. Another strategy is to “take the hit,” he says, “and then try to fix it.”published nearly a decade ago predicted that the mammals may use this alternate strategy . “But you need actual experiments to actually validate those predictions,” Tollis says.
In the lab, study coauthor Vera Gorbunova at the University of Rochester in New York and her colleagues ran an assortment of experiments on cells harvested from bowhead whale tissue, as well as on cells from humans, cows and mice. The whale cells were both efficient and accurate at repairing double-strand breaks in DNA, damage that severs both strands of the DNA double helix. Whale repair restored broken DNA to like-new condition more often than cells from other mammals, the team found. In those animals, mends to the genome tended to be sloppier, like a poorly patched pair of jeans. The team also identified two proteins in bowhead whale cells, CIRBP and RPA2, that are part of the DNA repair crew.
Discovering how animals fend off cancer is “incredibly exciting,” Abegglen says, “because all of these strategies have potential to be translated into effective treatments for people with cancer.” Though that day may be far off, the new findings underscore the importance of studying animals with low cancer rates, she says. Abegglen wants to test whether the team’s results hold up in humpback whale and dolphin cells — or if those animals have different defenses.
There’s so much to learn from these and other animals with large bodies and long life spans, Vincze says. “We probably have the solution to cancer medicine out there in nature already,” she says. “We just have to find it.”
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