Oh I know we are trying to genomically test them for oncology research and potential treatment plans, but do they do paternity tests on them?
replyI was trying to remember which mammal in Australia gets tumors from fighting, and I found a reference to a mother getting melanoma from her daughter. It’s unclear to me whether the cancer transmission was rare or the identification is rare.
There’s very often a comparison to the somatic (i.e. non-cancer) genome of the same patient. It’s a great way to quality control that there wasn’t some sample mixup in the lab.
replyTransmission of cancer is rare in humans—if it were not, it would make someone’s career to find many cases of it. While we can’t say that all sheep are white, we’ve looked at enough of them to say that black sheep are not common. Furthermore, it’s very clear how the Tasmanian devil cancer is spread—it’s around the mouth while they are biting each others faces; it’s not as obvious how one would spread most human cancers.
Oh that makes sense. I forgot about differential analysis.
replysomatic = cancer. germline = inherited.
replyIs HPV an example?
replyNot really. It's a virus that can cause cancer and not the cancer itself.
replytasmanian devils [edit: I guess you already said that] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
replyYup. Link is handy though. Someone will post it to the front page in 14 hours :)
replyTasmanian devils.
replyThe cancer problem always struck me as more of a control theory challenge than a purely biological one.
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