Multi-year project in Ukraine aims to uncover the health effects of chronic radiation exposure.
Hundreds of feral dogs live at the Chernobyl power plant and in the surrounding area.However, the health effects of low-levels of radiation are still hotly debated. This matters because people risk exposure to low doses of radiation in all sorts of contexts, including through certain medical scans or while working at nuclear power plants, says David Brenner, a radiation biophysicist at Columbia University in New York City who was not involved in the research.
This was a motivating factor for co-author Timothy Mousseau, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. In 2017, Mousseau joined a volunteer mission to provide veterinary care to the hundreds of stray dogs living in the exclusion zone, a 2,600-square-kilometre area around the power plant to which Ukrainian officials restrict access for safety reasons.
Over the course of three years of trips to the area, Mousseau and his colleagues collected blood samples from around 300 dogs living at the power plant and around the mostly deserted city of Chernobyl after volunteers had sedated the animals with tranquilizer darts. DNA analysis of the canines revealed that they were not newcomers to the area. By comparing the dogs’ genetic profiles to those of other free-roaming dogs in Eastern Europe, the team found that the canines in the vicinity of the power plant — some of which are related to shepherd breeds — have been isolated from other dog populations for decades.
But teasing out which genetic changes in the dogs are caused by radiation and which are caused by other factors — such as inbreeding or non-radioactive pollutants — won’t be easy, Brenner cautions. The team acknowledges these challenges, but the researchers argue that their detailed knowledge of these dogs’ ancestry, as well as knowledge of the levels of radiation different dogs were historically exposed to, “provides an ideal focus group for our future studies”.
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