Can elephants and dinosaurs teach us about cancer? Join us this Thursday (11/02) at 1pm EST for the eighth round of the MEME seminar!
@yagmur_erten will talk about life history evolution under cancer risk
Abstract:
Cancer is a risk all multicellular organisms face: each cell division comes with a probability of mutations that can eventually cause cancer. Yet some species like elephants achieve long lifespans and large body sizes even though they need more cell divisions (Peto’s paradox), possibly thanks to their high cancer defences. How do organisms attain their mature sizes without succumbing to cancer? Can cancer risk constrain body size evolution? What happens when large-bodied lineages like dinosaurs shrink in size? In this presentation, I will talk about life history evolution under cancer risk, challenges of growing a large body, and how evolutionary lags might explain cancer-robustness in birds.
Cancer is a risk all multicellular organisms face: each cell division comes with a probability of mutations that can eventually cause cancer. Yet some species like elephants achieve long lifespans and large body sizes even though they need more cell divisions (Peto’s paradox), possibly thanks to their high cancer defences. How do organisms attain their mature sizes without succumbing to cancer? Can cancer risk constrain body size evolution? What happens when large-bodied lineages like dinosaurs shrink in size? In this presentation, I will talk about life history evolution under cancer risk, challenges of growing a large body, and how evolutionary lags might explain cancer-robustness in birds.
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Originally from Turkey, she did her undergraduate in Molecular Biology & Genetics at Istanbul Technical University and studied at the University of Strasbourg before joining the 2013-2015 MEME cohort. After working at the University of Sydney in Australia, she began (and recently finished) her Ph.D. in the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich in Switzerland where she is currently a postdoctoral researcher. Yağmur has worked on a variety of topics like modeling of epidemiology and cultural evolution. Her Ph.D. and current postdoc research focuses on cancer, which is what she will be presenting on in her seminar. Follow Yağmur on Twitter (https://twitter.com/yagmur_