Scientists have found radiation-proof worms in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which could help with human cancer research. The 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant turned the surrounding area into the most radioactive place on Earth.
This raises questions about how chronic radiation affects DNA, reports the Mirror. "Chernobyl was a tragedy of incomprehensible scale, but we still don't have a great grasp on the effects of the disaster on local populations," said Sophia Tintori, a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Biology at NYU and the first author of the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
In 2019, Tintori and Rockman, along with scientists from Ukraine and the US, including biologist Timothy Mousseau, visited the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. They wanted to see if the area's worms had been affected by long-term radiation. At NYU, scientists kept studying the worms and even froze some. "We can cryopreserve worms, and then thaw them for study later. That means that we can stop evolution from happening in the lab, something impossible with most other animal models, and very valuable when we want to compare animals that have experienced different evolutionary histories," explained Rockman.
"We also don't know how long each of the worms we collected was in the zone, so we can't be sure exactly what level of exposure each worm and its ancestors received over the past four decades."