Experts identify the dogs from the city of Chernobyl in a separate population
Scientists have sequenced the DNA of 302 dogs living in the areas around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and found that the dogs living immediately on the power plant constitute a separate isolated population consisting of three families.
At the same time, scientists identified the dogs from the city of Chernobyl in a separate population. The results of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, should become the basis for further study of how radiation in the exclusion zone affects living organisms.
After the accident at the Chernobyl NPP (ChNPP) in April 1986, a huge number of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere: cesium-137, iodine-131 and many others. The greatest contamination occurred in a territory adjacent to the station with an area of 2,600 square kilometers, which is now considered an exclusion zone. In it, after the accident, the number of wild animal populations significantly decreased, and although some species recovered, others still fail to do so.
It remains unclear how the catastrophe affected the species’ genetic diversity. On the one hand, reducing the number of the population inevitably leads to its reduction, and on the other hand, the intense radiation background increases the frequency of mutations, which potentially increases genetic diversity. Therefore, scientists from America, China, Poland and Ukraine under the leadership of Elaine Ostrander from the National Human Genome Research Institute in the USA decided to find out how the population composition of dogs living in the restricted zone has changed.
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In the period from 2017 to 2019, three veterinary clinics were opened in the restricted zone, where help was provided to stray dogs living and walking around the territory of the zone, as scientists registered an increase in the population of wild dogs by more than 800 individuals. During this period, doctors took blood samples from 302 dogs and stored them for later analysis. 132 samples were obtained from dogs living directly on the territory of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, 154 – 15 kilometers from the station in the city of Chernobyl, and 16 – in the city of Slavutych, 45 kilometers from the nuclear power plant, where the workers of the Chernobyl NPP were relocated after the accident (many workers lived here for a long time before the accident).
DNA sequencing has shown that there are three isolated populations living at the respective sites (Chennai, Chernobyl and Slavutych), although the dogs in them are related to other populations. At the same time, the scientists found that the dogs living in the CHA NPP itself are genetically divided into three isolated families.
In addition, dogs from Chernobyl have the highest rate of heterozygosity compared to dogs from the other regions studied.
The scientists then looked at how much of the dog populations in all three study regions were from admixture of genetic material from other populations. It turned out that the dogs living in the Chernobyl NPP were the least likely to mix with other dogs. The dogs from Chernobyl followed, and the most non-isolated population was the one from Slavutich.
All these data, the scientists believe, allow to distinguish the dogs that live in the exclusion zone (including the ChNPP itself) into separate populations. This distinction will allow further research on these dogs, namely the study of how living in areas massively contaminated with radionuclides affects the large mammals and in particular their genetic material.
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