Goldenberg, Shifra Z., and George Wittemyer. " African Elephants Use Plant Odours to Make Foraging Decisions Across Multiple Spatial Scales." Animal Behaviour, vol. ![]() " Watch an Elephant ‘Count’ Simply by Using Its Sense of Smell." Science, 2019, doi:10.1126/science.aay2606 " Elephant Trunks form Joints to Squeeze Together Small Objects." Journal of the Royal Society Interface, vol. " Fission–Fusion Processes Weaken Dominance Networks of Female Asian Elephants in a Productive Habitat." Behavioral Ecology, vol. ![]() " Effects of Social Disruption in Elephants Persist Decades After Culling." Frontiers in Zoology, vol. " Asian Elephants ( Elephas maximus) Reassure Others in Distress." PeerJ, vol. " Seismic Properties of Asian Elephant ( Elephas maximus) Vocalizations and Locomotion." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. " An Asian Elephant Imitates Human Speech." Current Biology, vol. " Elephants Can Determine Ethnicity, Gender, and Age From Acoustic Cues in Human Voices." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. " Loxodonta cyclotis: African Forest Elephant." Animal Diversity Web. " Elephant Natural History: A Genomic Perspective." Annual Review of Animal Biosciences, vol. “This is an important publication.Roca, Alfred L., et al. “Elephants, with their low incidence of cancer, have emerged as a surprising resource in human cancer research for understanding the intrinsic cellular response to DNA damage,” says Fox Chase Cancer Center virologist Virginia Pearson, who was not involved in the study. They are exploring how its p53 proteins interact with damaged cells and other key molecules and plan to compare those findings with results from human cells. This points to “exciting possibilities for exploring powerful new approaches to cancer protection in humans,” she adds.įåhraeus and his colleagues are now following up on these results using blood samples from an African elephant at the Vienna Zoo. ![]() These “remarkable” results imply that elephants have a spectrum of means through which p53 can operate, says Sue Haupt, a cell biologist at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in Australia, who was not involved in the work. Additionally, elephants' p53 copies activate in response to varying molecular triggers and so respond to damaged cells differently, which likely gives an edge when detecting and weeding out mutations. First, the fact that elephants possess multiple copies lowers the chance of p53 no longer working because of mutations. The scientists virtually modeled and examined elephants' 40 p53 proteins, finding two ways the gene could help elephants avoid cancer. Without action from p53, cancer can easily take hold: in more than half of all human cancers, the gene's function has been lost through random mutations. ![]() It works by pausing replication and then either initiating repair or causing cells to self-destruct if the damage is too extensive. In mammals, p53 plays a crucial role in preventing mutated cells from turning into tumors. The work “opens many new possibilities to study how cells protect themselves from a damaged genome, both in elephants and in humans,” says study co-author Robin Fåhraeus, a molecular oncologist at France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research. New research in Molecular Biology and Evolution delves into how elephants' many copies offer cancer-fighting advantages. Those copies, each with two variations called alleles, produce a total of 40 proteins, compared with humans' (and most animals') single copy producing two proteins. Elephants have an astounding 20 copies of this gene. Why?įor elephants, at least, part of the answer may be the gene commonly known as p53, which also helps humans and many other animals repair DNA damaged during replication. Scientists call it Peto's paradox: cancer is caused by gene mutations that accumulate in cells over time, yet long-lived animals that have lots of cells, such as elephants and whales, hardly ever get it.
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