Post
Log in
Kropotkinson
Kropotkinson
@amici@loops.video  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
A woman working in a bio lab explains Peto's paradox (large animals with more cells do not appear to have higher rates of cancer, even with more cells that can mutate to cause cancer). She then goes on to explain a new finding about how bowhead whales, which indigenous people say can live for up to two human lifetimes. The finding is about how whale cells repair double-strand DNA breaks (DNA come in pairs of DNA attached together as a double helix, if both helices break, that's much more difficult to repair than if just one strand breaks). Double-strand breaks are typically repaired by non-homologous end joining, a method which can be deleterious of DNA information. Whales and humans use the same general process of non-homologous end joining, but differ in a protein called CIRBP which is slightly different in whales. Introducing it into human DNA made the protein more abundant and more effective, while introducing the human variant in whale cells made them less abundant and less effective.