Discoveries

March 15, 2023

Nuclear Dogs

Listen to Today's Edition

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine forced residents living near the nuclear plant to abandon their homes and belongings to escape dangerous levels of radiation.

Many also left their pets behind, including dogs, which were later culled by authorities to prevent them from spreading radioactive contamination.

But some of the pooches survived and now scientists have discovered that their descendants living around the disaster area are genetically distinct from other canine populations outside the site, New Scientist reported.

For their paper, researchers sequenced genomes collected from the blood samples of more than 300 dogs in the Chernobyl area between 2017 and 2019. The majority of the sampled animals lived either very close to the destroyed nuclear plant or in Chernobyl City, located more than nine miles from the plant.

A small sample lived in the Slavutych area, a more populated zone about 28 miles from the nuclear plant and much less contaminated.

The findings showed that the genomes of dogs living near the plant and Chernobyl City were very different from those in Slavutych, as well as compared with dogs in other parts of Ukraine and other countries.

However, the team noted there are a lot of questions about the Chernobyl dogs, such as whether radiation altered their genes, or whether that was the result of decades of inbreeding because of their relative isolation.

In the future, they hope to conduct more research on the unique population.

Meanwhile, researchers said that the study can help find genetic variants that promote resistance to cancer, or aid in the development of protections against radiation exposure.

“A nuclear disaster like this has only happened once in human history – we hope it never happens again – so we want to learn everything we possibly can from it,” said co-author Elaine Ostrander.

This story originally appeared in the March 15, 2023 newsletter, Call Me.