西亚试剂：Mammoth set

Lynch’s team — working with African and Asian elephant skin cells from the San Diego Zoo in California — found similar results. They also discovered more than a dozen TP53 copies in two extinct species of mammoth, but just one copy in elephants’ close living relatives, manatees and hyraxes (a small, furry mammal). Lynch thinks that the extra copies evolved as the lineage that led to elephants expanded in size. But he thinks that other biological mechanisms are involved too.

Mel Greaves, a cancer biologist at the Institute for Cancer Research in London, agrees that TP53cannot be the only explanation. “As large animals get bigger, they become more and more sluggish,” he notes, thereby slowing their metabolism and the pace at which their cells divide. And protective mechanisms can only do so much to stop cancer, he adds. “What would happen if elephants smoked and had a bad diet,” he says. “Would they really be protected from cancer? I doubt it.”

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