New research has revealed that insects collected from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone have a special type of superpower.
Chernobyl is a nuclear power plant that suffered a major disaster in 1986, and the area around it was closed off for a long time due to the release of radiation.
After the disaster, the evacuation of humans was ensured, but the animals and plants remained there, which were constantly exposed to radiation.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, plants and animals were mutated due to the blast, leaves changed shape after the blast and some animals were born with physical deformities.
The researchers were surprised to find that they could not detect radiation damage to the genomes of insects brought back from Chernobyl.
“This doesn’t mean Chernobyl is safe, it’s more likely that nematodes are really resilient animals and can withstand extreme conditions,” said Sophia Tintori, a postdoctoral associate in New York University’s Department of Biology and first author of the study. can’.
“We don’t even know how long each of the insects we’ve collected has been present in each zone, so we can’t be sure that each insect and its species have evolved over the past four decades,” he said. At what level were the ancestors exposed to radiation’?
Could this result help humans? Researchers say it could be important in the fight against cancer.