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Will urbanisation affect the expression level of genes related to cancer of wild great tits?
- Source :
- Science of the Total Environment, Science of the Total Environment, 2020, 714, pp.135793. ⟨10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135793⟩, Science of the Total Environment, Elsevier, 2020, 714, pp.135793. ⟨10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.135793⟩
- Publication Year :
- 2019
-
Abstract
- International audience; Recent studies suggest that oncogenic processes (from precancerous lesions to metastatic cancers) are widespread in wild animal species, but their importance for ecosystem functioning is still underestimated by evolutionary biologists and animal ecologists. Similar to what has been observed in humans, environmental modifications that often place wild organisms into an evolutionary trap and/or exposes them to a cocktail of mutagenic and carcinogenic pollutants might favor cancer emergence and progression, if animals do not up-regulate their defenses against these pathologies. Here, we compared, for the first time, the expression of 59 tumor-suppressor genes in blood and liver tissues of urban and rural great tits (Parus major); urban conditions being known to favor cancer progression due to, among other things, exposure to chemical or light pollution. Contrary to earlier indications, once we aligned the transcriptome to the great tit genome, we found negligible differences in the expression of anti-cancer defenses between urban and rural birds in blood and liver. Our results indicate the higher expression of a single caretaker gene (i.e. BRCA1) in livers of rural compared to urban birds. We conclude that, while urban birds might be exposed to an environment favoring the development of oncogenic processes, they seem to not upregulate their cancer defenses accordingly and future studies should confirm this result by assessing more markers of cancer defenses. This may result in a mismatch that might predispose urban birds to higher cancer risk and future studies in urban ecology should take into account this, so far completely ignored, hazard.
- Subjects :
- Pollutants
Environmental Engineering
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences
[SDV]Life Sciences [q-bio]
Zoology
010501 environmental sciences
Biology
Affect (psychology)
01 natural sciences
Transcriptome
Urbanization
Neoplasms
medicine
Environmental Chemistry
Animals
Passeriformes
Waste Management and Disposal
Gene
Ecosystem
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
Cancer
Parus
Tumor-suppressor genes
15. Life on land
medicine.disease
biology.organism_classification
Pollution
Urban ecology
13. Climate action
Evolutionary trap
Environmental Pollution
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 18791026 and 00489697
- Volume :
- 714
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- The Science of the total environment
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....a6075f65478ea285e84d4263be554ea7