‘Zombie gene’ may protect elephants from cancer,

Maybe it’s the elephant’s genes that never forget.

In addition to having great memories, elephants are known for having a very low incidence of cancer. In what might seem a wild mash-up of the SyFi channel and National Geographic, new research has uncovered a surprising factor that protects elephants against the dread disease: a gene that had gone dormant in their mammalian ancestors, but got turned back on as their evolving bodies grew ever bigger.

Scientists call it a “zombie gene”—cue the chilling music here—“a reanimated pseudogene that kills cells when expressed.”

The zombie gene is not just a curiosity.

Along with elephants, several kinds of whales as well as bats and the naked mole rat share enviably minuscule rates of cancer. Biologists suspect that each of those species has evolved a different strategy to ward off malignancies, and they want to understand them all. In time, they might find ways to approximate those strategies in humans and drive down our vulnerability to cancer.

“That’s not easy,” said Vincent J. Lynch, who led the research published this week in the journal Cell Reports.

Nor, he added, would it always be safe. After all, mechanisms that thwart fast-growing cells or turbocharge cellular-repair machinery have evolved over countless generations in fine balance with other checks and balances, Lynch said. Transfer one of these mechanisms willy-nilly to another species, and it would very likely run amok, he said.

“But if you don’t do the research, you’ll never know,” added Lynch, left for dead, like vast stretches of every species’ genomes.

But in the elephant, Lynch and his colleagues saw that one of the additional copies of the LIF gene was active. When the researchers induced cell stress—a step that would have led to cancer in most other animals—a widely recognized tumor-suppressor mechanism turned on. That, in turn, activated the LIF6 pseudogene.

Stirred to life, the zombie gene proceeded to carry out its grim program, entering the internal machinery of damaged cells and ordering them to kill themselves. In elephant tissue, the damaged cells turned themselves insideout, and cancer was thwarted before it could gain any momentum.

And when the researchers suppressed the action of the LIF6 “zombie gene,” they found that stressed cells were more likely to form tumors in elephant tissue.