Surprising similarities between human and zebrafish tumors
Most human cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes, the large bundles of DNA that store all of a cell’s genetic information. However, scientists realized more than 100 years ago that tumor cells usually have extra copies of some chromosomes. This trait, known as aneuploidy, appears to give tumor cells a survival edge.MIT biologists led by Professor Nancy Hopkins have now shown that aneuploidy also arises in tumors in zebrafish, which are increasingly used to study cancer biology. The finding, published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, should help scientists identify cancer-promoting genes that could become targets for new drugs, said Hopkins.Mice are the animals most commonly used to study cancer, but most of the mice genetically engineered to develop tumors do not usually produce highly aneuploid tumors. This is why zebrafish offer a useful model for studying this phenomenon. Hopkins and her colleagues found that...