Presenter Kevin Gori
Authors Kevin Gori
Affiliations University of Cambridge
Presentation Type Talk
Abstract
To date, numerous infectious cancers have been discovered in the wild. The oldest known, Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour (CTVT), is a disease that infects primarily free roaming dogs.
Originating as a tumour in an Asian dog over six thousand years ago, for millennia CTVT has spread among dog populations as a contagious allograft. The CTVT cancer cells that infect modern dogs are direct descendants of the transformed cells of the progenitor animal and carry clonal copies of its genome. However, it is possible that a tumour cell can acquire DNA from normal cells non-clonally, through a process of horizontal gene transfer.
By exploiting the increased genetic diversity between cancer and host that is characteristic of transmissible cancers, we have recently identified the signature of horizontal gene transfer from host to tumour in a lineage of modern tumour samples. Using genomic sequence analysis, cytology and population genetics, we trace the source of this signal to a transfer of a highly rearranged fragment of DNA that was incorporated by CTVT from a host dog that lived in the Middle East over two thousand years ago.