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Australia's iconic Tasmanian devil develops resistance to cancer

Xinhua, August 31, 2016 Adjust font size:

Australia's iconic marsupial, the Tasmanian devil, is developing resistance to a cancer that has nearly wiped out the species, a study has found.

Since being discovered in 1996, devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) has killed more than 80 percent of the Tasmanian devil population, making the marsupials an endangered species.

An international 17-year study, published on Wednesday in the highly respected journal Nature Communications, identified genetic changes in the devils that are associated with fighting cancer.

"The main result of this study is that the devil is evolving at a genomic level," Menna Jones, a co-author of the study and a professor from the University of Tasmania's School of Biological Sciences, told the ABC.

"The regions (in its DNA) that are changing in response to the disease are those that are associated with cancer and immune function.

"It indicates that the devil is adapting, it's responding to the disease in ways that it may be able to beat the cancer and save itself."

Griffith University's Hamish McCallum, another study co-author, said that while the devil was expected to build resistance to the cancer, the research team was surprised by how quickly it had adapted.

"Tasmanian devils have got very low genetic diversity. Evolution can happen rapidly but it needs genetic variation to work from," McCallum said.

"To find this rapid change in populations with very low genetic diversity is something we didn't expect. I published modeling seven years ago that suggested these populations should be extinct by now and they're not."

Researchers are hopeful that studying the Tasmanian devils' adaptation will help scientists understand cancers in humans and other species.

"We're seeing a cancer in its very early stages, in its first 20 years of life as a cancer, so we're able to watch the evolution of the cancer and the evolution of the animal it's infecting," Jones said.

"It provides us with an amazing opportunity to study how cancers evolve and how hosts can evolve to overcome cancer." Endit