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Methods matter and the debate over the meaning and means of studying #PetosParadox are revisited, revisited, revisited, revisited, revisited, and revisited yet again. I'm here for it... #EvMed 🧪 ♋

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

a whale is jumping out of the water with the words whale hello there written below it ALT: a whale is jumping out of the water with the words whale hello there written below it

A recent Spotlight article I wrote for @cp-molcell.bsky.social about one of the mechanisms that may contribute to the exceptional longevity in bowhead whales (over 200 years!) 🧪 🐋 #EvMed #PetosParadox #DevoEvo

www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

Rare longevity-associated variants, including a reduced-function mutation in cGAS, identified in multigenerational long-lived families Life expectancy has steadily increased in the last two centuries, while healthspan has been lagging behind. Survival into extreme ages strongly clusters within families which often exhibit a delayed o...

Something very cool is going on with cGAS-STING signaling in #ageing and #cancer #PetosParadox #EvMed

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

It's very important for our work on #PetosParadox. We focus on bowheads but always worry other species could live as long, and we just haven't found them yet. The demographic explanation seems obvious in hindsight, but it never occurred to me; that's why I like feeling stupid reading papers :-)

a whale is jumping out of the water with the words whale hello there written below it ALT: a whale is jumping out of the water with the words whale hello there written below it

So, bowhead whales, which can live over 200 years, may not be so special after all. "Extreme longevity may be the rule not the exception in Balaenid whales", big if true 🧪 🐋 #PetosParadox

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

A cGAS-mediated mechanism in naked mole-rats potentiates DNA repair and delays aging Efficient DNA repair might make possible the longevity of naked mole-rats. However, whether they have distinctive mechanisms to optimize functions of DNA repair suppressors is unclear. We find that na...

This is so cool! Four amino acid changes in the naked mole rat cGAS turn it from a DNA repair inhibitor into an enhancer

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

What is going on in armadillos, which have lost the cGAS and STING genes‽ #PetosParadox #EvMed 🧪

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40463121/

Correlation between body mass and percentage of neutrophils in the blood of Afrotherians; elephants are one of the species with the lowest

Very interesting that neutrophil metabolism plays a role in promoting metastasis in the lung – elephants are among the species lowest percentage of neutrophils in their blood #PetosParadox 🧪 🐘

www.embopress.org/doi/full/10....

At the heart of cancer biology lies a perplexing contradiction known as Peto's Paradox which is the observation that cancer risk does not scale with body size or lifespan across species.

open.substack.com/pub/doc4hear...
#cancer #bats #longevity #petosparadox

Apropos of the debates about the definition of #PetosParadox, Gemini describes it as "the apparent lack of a strong positive correlation between body size and cancer risk across different species."

Because of that, we didn't have time to debate what #PetosParadox really was and formalize the research program/questions; fields adopted their own. Early on, it seems to me that Molecular/cell folks tended to adopt the strict one, and Evolution folks adopted the relaxed one.

Shameless self promotion of an excellent article on #EvMed #PetosParadox by @vcallier.bsky.social heads up @ubuffalo.bsky.social 🧪 🐘 🦇🐋🧫🧬

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Tried this and the #EvMed #PetosParadox field exploded in my face. Study elephant cancer I said, who else is going to do that? Maybe armadillos or bats or whales‽ That’s so niche and rando, naked mole rats aside, who else would be interested in studying their cancer? Turns out…

We have a cool project, but since we have never done these assays before, we are happy to trade authorship for someone doing them! #Aging #PetosParadox #Telomere 🧪

Best known for – wherein we found that elephants don't have so much cancer but do have lots of (retrogene) copies of p53
#EvMed #PetosParadox 🧪 🐋🌱 🐘 🦀

elifesciences.org/articles/11994

#PetosParadox #EvMed 🧪

The Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) genome provides insights into extreme longevity bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Greenland sharks are the longest lived vertebrate, while we’re not sure just how long they can live, some are probably over 500 years old! With a genome we can begin to discover the secretes of their remarkably long lifespans #EvMed #PetosParadox #OneHealth🦈🧬🧪

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Elephant genomes have been accumulating mutated copies of the master #TumorSupressor p53 for the last 50 million years or so; we’re not really sure what they do but it might help protect cells from turning into #Cancer, guess we’re going to find out soon! #EvMed #OneHealth #PetosParadox 🧬🧫🐘🧪

How can these sharks live over 400 years and not be riddled with cancer‽ If we only had their cells! 🦈🧬🧫♋️ #EvMed #PetosParadox #OneHealth

(We do know it has nothing to do with their cartilage)

Long lived plants (trees) have lower somatic mutation rates than short lived ones (like mammals!) #EvMed #PetosParadox

The latest chapter in our quest to discover the secrets of cancer resistance in elephants #Evolution #EvMed #PetosParadox #Cancer

Sure Perucetus may be a lot smaller but blue whales may be a 120 tones bigger than we thought! How are they not riddled with cancer‽ #EvMed #PetosParadox