Vampyr Hounds: Dead Dog Cell Immortality Infects Other Dogs?

Cute Dead Dog.

And on with the story... Carl Zimmer looks at an interesting idea in biology... when can a parasitic mutation (like cancers) be considered a separate entity from its host. Or as he puts it "Can a tumor become a new form of life?".

Sticker's Sarcoma is an aleggedly transmissible tumour found in dogs. These tumours have been suggested to act more like a normal pathogen, they can be given to dogs from other dogs, by biting, licking, scratching and other transmission pathways. A similar mode of transmission has been suggested for Tasmanian Devil mouth tumours.

The weird thing is, these scientists did a genetic survey, comparing tumour cells with each other and their hosts - they found this:

"All of the tumor cells shared the same genetic marker," and that " the tumor cells [were] closely related to one another--and not closely related to the dogs in which they had been found."

Carl Zimmer calls this "Freaky". It's all sort of freaky, a little freaky-scary and a little freaky-cool.

Racial Memory Resurfaces in Plants

Plants have been shown to inherit stress (this story was also run by nature, and other sources); that is, they respond to stress that their parents suffered, even though they themselves haven't been exposed to the stress themselves and (the bigger point) no noticeble genetic changes have been inherited from the parent.

What is affecting them then?

Perhaps it is a system wide intra-cellular effect that the stress factors (radiation or pathogen factors) leave in the parent; possibly with proteins to do with transcription, cellular membranes, or some other cell function... the net result being that the offspring seem to have a predisposition to homologous recombination - a known DNA repair tool.

This whole thing was stumbled upon by accident too.

It does highlight that non-(directly)-genetic factors may possibly be involved in trait inheritence and generation (as well as DNA repair, homologous recombination generates mutants, its a biologically random repair system).

Who was Neanderthal-man?

Fresh off the press at Nature, is news that geneticists are hoping to sequence out Neanderthal DNA for comparison with humans and chimps. The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has put a two year goal on the idea.

With the NGHRI planning on sequencing all major primate species, it means that scientists will be able to compare these with Neanderthal's and get a clearer picture of its ancestry - and its relative position to us.

The only problem is that most (barring Encino Man) Neanderthals are fossils, and fossils don't have a good track record of giving viable genetic data for complete sequences. But Neanderthals are young, so maybe there is a little hope. Although I have a feeling it's about as realistic as Mammoth Park.