The Weinstein podcast on lab mouse telomeres is pretty interesting. I’ve heard various refutations claiming it doesn’t matter, but my grug brained undergraduate biology training tells me that maybe it does and the bigbrain sophistry is a case of trying too hard to rescue now questionable research.
Short version is that for a long time scientists thought mice had naturally long telomeres, but actually that is just an unintentionally selectively bred for trait in lab mice, because wild field mice have normal mammalian telomeres. And supposedly the upshot of that is lab mice are really good at cellular regeneration. Which means unless an experiment kills them some other way they inevitably die of cancer.
I don’t know. Like I said my bio is limited to having been awake in class as an undergraduate and doing some basic lab work like PCR and gel electrophoresis. Oh and sexing fruit flies. Who doesn’t love that fruit fly sexing?
The claim in the podcast I’m referring to is that the very long telomeres allow an exceptional regenerative capacity. Weinstein’s theory is that senescence is basically an anti-cancer defense. If a cell becomes cancerous and then burns through its telomeres dividing, it will grow to be a mole and then stop. Incidentally that’s supposedly why symmetrical moles are ok and asymmetrical moles are scary. An asymmetry suggests that one of the cells in the benign tumor has mutated to start dividing again. Obviously that would be bad.
Short version is that for a long time scientists thought mice had naturally long telomeres, but actually that is just an unintentionally selectively bred for trait in lab mice, because wild field mice have normal mammalian telomeres. And supposedly the upshot of that is lab mice are really good at cellular regeneration. Which means unless an experiment kills them some other way they inevitably die of cancer.