"Can a tumor become a new form of life?"
Posted: Sat Aug 26, 2006 5:16 pm
http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2006/08/09/an_old_dog_lives_on_inside_new.php#more wrote: A Dead Dog Lives On (Inside New Dogs)
Posted on: August 9, 2006 12:02 PM, by Carl Zimmer
Can a tumor become a new form of life?
This is the freaky but serious question that arises from a new study in the journal Cell. Scientists from London and Chicago have studied a peculiar cancer that afflicts dogs, known as canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) or Sticker's sarcoma.
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All of the tumor cells shared the same genetic marker. A virus-like stretch of DNA, called a LINE-1 element, had been moved to a new location in the genome of all of the tumor cells. None of the non-tumor cells from the dogs had this LINE-1 element in this particular spot. Other genetic markers also revealed the tumor cells to be closely related to one another--and not closely related to the dogs in which they had been found.
... To figure out their heritage, the scientists drew up an evolutionary tree, based on comparisons of their DNA to that of dogs and wolves. The cancer cells descend either from a gray wolf (the closest relatives of dogs) or from one of the older East Asian breeds of domesticated dog. That ancestral cell probably existed in a dog or wolf that lived several centuries ago. The scientists came to this conclusion by studying the mutations that have arisen in the cancer cells. Based on estimates of how fast mammal cells mutate, the scientists estimate that the mutations arose over the past 2500 to 250 years ago. But since cancer cells tend to mutate faster than normal cells, they favor a date at the recent end of the range.
The scientists propose that several centuries ago, a histiocyte cell in a dog or a wolf turned cancerous. A mutation may have caused the cell to become abnormal--perhaps that LINE-1 element that marks Sticker's sarcoma cells today. But natural selection would have favored other mutations as well that allowed its descendants to become more effective at growing into a tumor. During mating, some of the cancer cells managed to spread to the dog's partner, where they could continue to proliferate.
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So here's the big question which the authors don't tackle head on: what is this thing? Is it a medieval Chinese dog that has found immortality? ...
Sticker's sarcoma has, without any intervention from scientists, become a cell line as well, and one that has survived far longer than HeLa cells have. It is distinct from its dog ancestors, and has acquired adaptations that allow it to manipulate its hosts for its own advantage as effectively as a virus or a blood fluke. A parasite evolved from a dog, perhaps.
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Reference: Murgia et al.: "Clonal Origin and Evolution of a Transmissible Cancer." Publishing in Cell 126, 477-487, August 11, 2006. DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2006.05.051