'Heartbroken families pinned notes to their doors: Don’t kill our Zhulka. The Nobel Prize-winning book Chernobyl Prayer reconstructed the terrifying early days of the disaster through oral history, including the trauma people experience when they had to abandon their pets. Right: After the dogs were darted, they were gently placed in the back of a van to transport to the makeshift surgical building for treatment. “Ultimately, we want to know what happened to the genomic DNA that allowed to live and breed and survive in a radioactive environment,” Ostrander says. The research has the potential to transform knowledge about the effects of radiation on mammals, including humans, the researchers say. Mutations-or the potential for mutations-could be passed down from ancestors who survived the blast back in 1986. Since they don’t spend much time in the gene pool, Ostrander hypothesizes that “whatever happened in the genome that allowed these dogs to survive in this very hostile environment are probably pretty big, important genes that do pretty important things.”īy identifying families, they can look for differences between offspring and parents.

They die young, by three or four years old 10 to 12 is normal for 75-pound dogs. These Chernobyl dogs are valuable to science because they’ve lived and evolved in isolation for 15 generations since the disaster. So Mousseau included the location of where each dog was captured when he collected blood samples. Mousseau and Ostrander realized that the first step was understanding the population: who was who and where the dogs lived, as radiation levels vary widely. These results provide preliminary, baseline data for a multi-year project that will explore how chronic radiation exposure has impacted the dogs’ genetics. The food and care from Chernobyl workers helped the dogs survive in an extremely hostile environment. Right: The dogs became very fond of a Chernobyl worker who fed them every morning. Their recent publication in Science Advances characterizes the genetic structure of 302 free-roaming mixed-breed dogs and deciphered their pedigrees, identifying 15 different families, some large, some small. He’s now joined four missions from 2017 to 2022, with plans to return this year.Įlaine Ostrander, who runs the Dog Genome Project at the National Human Genome Research Institute, came onboard to sequence the DNA samples.

But this project offered a living laboratory to hunt for radiation-induced genetic mutations in a large number of animals. He’d been conducting wildlife studies in Chernobyl since 2000. Mousseau tag-teamed with a research component: collecting blood and tissue samples for DNA analysis. nonprofit Clean Futures Fund (CFF) that traveled to Ukraine to establish a spay/neuter and vaccination program to control the population. Mousseau, an evolutionary biologist at the University of South Carolina, was partnering with a team from the U.S.

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