Living Fossils

Alligator gar (Yale News)

No, this isn't a post about politics.

"Living fossils," (Darwin's term) specifically the gars, have little species diversity and have evolved so slowly that their genome is nearly the same as gars during the age of the dinosaurs. Importantly, understanding gars' cellular mechanisms could lead to a cure for cancer (!).

The researchers speculate that gars have an unusually strong DNA repair apparatus, allowing them to correct somatic and germline mutations — alterations to DNA that occur before and after conception — more efficiently than most other vertebrates.

If confirmed, these findings could have profound implications for human health, said [Prof. Thomas J.] Near, the Bingham Oceanographic Curator of Ichthyology at the Yale Peabody Museum.

“Most cancers are somatic mutations that represent failures of an individual’s DNA repair mechanisms,” he said. “If further study proves that gar DNA repair mechanisms are extremely efficient, and discovers what makes them so, we could start thinking about potential applications to human health.”

Another Eureka moment in science, this time from a species that is little changed from its ancestors a hundred million years ago.