Quirks and Quarks - Fossilized squirrel poop full of ancient animals, and more…

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Gold miners working in the Yukon regularly find ancient ground squirrel burrows throughout the permafrost, many containing fossilized feces. Researchers analyzing these well-preserved poop piles found they contain some of the oldest DNA ever recovered, dating from 30,000 to 700,000 years ago. Tucked inside were traces of a wide range of ancient animals, including woolly mammoths, grasshoppers, steppe bison, ancient horses, American cheetahs, as well as hundreds of plant species.PLUS:‘Super-good, ice-making microbes’ may trigger snow and rain, or help freeze foodWe’re a hotbed of mutations, and scientists are leveraging that for our healthGoing out on a limb. Animals regrow body parts, maybe we can tooFrom the archives: Isaac Asimov on human creativity and robots

I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are.

Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, what ancient squirrel poop can tell us about life in the ice age? They were eating the carcasses of loy mammoths and their DNA somehow is surviving through that digestive system and remains perfectly preserved in their poop. And a look at how axolodal salamanders regrow a limb that's been chomped off by a predator.

It's really incredible what cells and molecules are able to do right at the place of amputation. Plus, an archival interview with Dr. Isaac Asimov, microbes that can make it rain, and how are constantly mutating DNA is a good thing. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. The Yukon is known for its gold. And even though the days of the Klondike gold rush are long gone, miners are still hard at work extracting precious metals from the earth. Last year alone, they collected $449 million worth of gold.

One way they accessed this material is by blasting the permafrost with water to melt out whatever's buried within. And the miners often end up finding an entirely different kind of treasure, ice age fossils. It's really obvious when you see bones, see a bison skull, you see a mammoth, femur. Yeah, the gold miners definitely think we're a bit odd to say the least, but for us, it's this kind of amazing archive that we do not get access to elsewhere. That's Dr. Scott Cocker, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stockholm University. He's been on several research expeditions in the Yukon since 2021, working alongside other scientists to study

some of the thousands of fossils unearthed by mining operations every year. Sometimes you find these little furry balls. They just kind of look like little bundles of hay in the periphrost, but for a long time, just didn't really know what they were. These unassuming bundles turned out to be ancient ground squirrel burrows, also called middens, dating anywhere from 30,000 to 700,000 years old. And while they aren't as attention-grabbing as the big woolly mammoths and other megafauna remains,

Dr. Cocker wanted to take a closer look at what had been squirled away by these ancient rodents. So in the middens themselves, they can be a bit of a plethora of things, including seeds and insects and bones of other animals. But the fun thing is what I was always finding, or almost always finding copperlites or paleo feces or these turds, whatever you want to call them, we find them in the middens.

And so I had been keeping them aside. Maybe it says something about me as a person. but it was just curiosity there to what more information can we get. He brought these fossilized squirrel feces to biomolecular archaeologist Dr. Tyler Merci to see what they could find buried within. And in a new paper out this week, they reveal that these ancient squirrel poops are an ecological gold mine. Dr. Merci is with the Hakai Institute on Vancouver Island. Hello and welcome to our program.

Hi, thanks, Bob. Great to be here. So before your analysis, what did you expect to find in these samples? Yeah, I mean, part of the reason Scott and I had got into this was I've been working with sedimentary ancient DNA, and we found that that's a really amazing archive for recording kind of a snapshot of a whole ecosystem. But we thought, well, there's a ton of stuff in these middens. And we thought, well, it would be interesting. What if we looked at the DNA and the copper lights and wondered, well, what could be in there? And I really just initially thought,

that's going to be squirrel DNA and their gut microbiome. I really wasn't anticipating there would be such an enormous environmental signal. But thinking about it more, it really makes sense that there would be. And when you say copperlites,

that's the scientific term for poop, right? Yeah, yeah, for old poop. And in this case, they haven't fossilized. They've just been frozen in place for tens to hundreds of thousands of years. So when you looked at the DNA, what did you find? A whole variety.

of animals that we really weren't expecting, such as woolly mammoths, American horses, steppe bison, birds, about like 200 species of plants, tons of microbes, insects. It's really just a fantastic snapshot of all these different time points of the organisms that were in the area of these burrows. Wow. Wully mammoths and horses? Squirrels were hunting woolly mammoths and horses? Hunting it in their poop.

Yeah. So one would generally assume that, oh, you know, Arctic ground squirrels, they probably mostly eat nuts and seeds and plant material, kind of herbivores in a way. They're really way more omnivorous than that. There's lots of great documented wildlife photography from motion capture of seeing these ground squirrels feasting on the carcass of a moose or a lynx. And so their diet breath is huge. And it's in part because they're only awake for about maybe four months of the year.

And then the other eight months, they're in a hibernation. or a state of torpor. And so they need to get out on that landscape, eat as much as they can, store as much material as they can to make it through the rest of the year. And so they're eating everything. And we think they were eating the carcasses of woolly mammoths

that had died on the mammoth step and that their DNA somehow is surviving through that digestive system and remains perfectly preserved in their poop. So they're true omnibores then. They hunt, they scavenge, they eat everything that's around. Yeah. They're kind of almost like little bears in a way, mixed with kind of like a pack rat

that's bringing all these materials to their burrow, which in a sense turns them in these kind of unintentional archivists that really helped paleontologists out by collecting all this stuff and putting it at one spot for us to come along thousands of years later and find. Well, how much detail did you get out of the DNA? Yeah, we can get species levels hits for many, many different organisms in addition to understanding the genera and the families that are there because different parts of DNA are more conserved than others. But we were also

able to reassemble genomes of different organisms. So we were able to assemble 18 mitochondrial genomes from both the squirrels and the things that they ate, such as the horses and bison. We were also able to assemble six mitochondrial genomes of woolly mammoths. What do we

know about these squirrels, these ancient squirrels that left behind this poop? We think that they had a lot of the same sort of behaviors as they do today. Their range is much more constricted than it was during the Pleistocene because they like open environments. They don't really like wooded areas because they can't see predators. So now they're kind of restricted to alpine locations. But in the past, they're all over Beringia and the northern hemisphere. And they're still around today, but we think actually that

the species that were there in the past were different. And the taxonomy needs some work that there are maybe ultimately multiple species in the past that aren't really represented by the current taxonomic system we have, just because people haven't looked into them as much as, you know, other charismatic megafauna like believe mammoths. Yeah. Oh, what does this poop tell you about the environments of the Klondike, the Yukon, you know, hundreds of thousands of years ago? I would say the biggest jump out to me is this overall continuity during the Pleistocene. It's really this, the same sort of configuration of plants and animals. It seems throughout much of it, and then the big shift is the Holocene, totally different ecosystem. And this,

This transition happened, you know, about 11,700 years ago. There's a lot more work to come for really getting fine-tuned detail analyses of these. And this is kind of just opening a window to a whole new type of sample to get these biomolecules from. Did it give you a sense of how quickly change can happen? One site in particular, this is the Lucky Lady site that we've published on a few times now. All the evidence from the pollen and the ancient DNA and other markers seems to suggest, It went from Mammestep, open grass environment, towards Woody Shreblend, totally different animals, and about 40 years. So a really rapid shift in that ecosystem.

40 years. I know. Yeah, I'd always kind of assumed, oh, it would take hundreds, thousands of years. It'd be a gradual transition. But some of these things are gradual and some can be quite punctuated. And it's samples like this that will really help us dive in to know how common is that? Is that a feature we would see at other sites? or can these transitions really be that abrupt?

What's your next step? Yeah, well, through our work with McMaster University, we received an N-Circ Alliance grant that's allowing us to do a ton more research into permafrost and coprolites and marine cores. And this whole goal is this Canadian-wide effort to really understand the records we have here and create high-resolution understandings of ecological change

over really deep timescales. And we're conducting this work all over Canada and we're really excited to keep going now that we've had so much success here, there's so many more stories to unlock. And part of that is just getting up there and safeguarding a lot of these records, too, because the permafrost is melting so rapidly. Some sites are disappearing. You go out and sample one year, and then you go back and it's gone.

And so safeguarding a lot of these materials, which Dwayne Fraze is doing at the University of Alberta, can help safeguard them for future scientists down the road. Dr. Merci, thank you so much for your time. Thanks so much, Bob. It was great to be here. Dr. Tyler Merci is a biomolecular archaeologist with the Hackeye Institute on Vancouver Island and an adjunct assistant professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. It's one of the most famous movie scenes in history,

where Luke Skywalker, in an epic lightsaber battle with Darth Vader, gets his hand cut off, right before the shocking truth comes out. No, I am the father. Now, unfortunately for Luke, in the Star Wars universe, they haven't figured out how to get his hand to grow back. But what if, in the real world, it were possible to regrow parts of our bodies? In the animal kingdom, axolotal salamanders, mice, and zebrafish all have this remarkable ability to some extent. And now a group of scientists working with these animals have found the genes responsible for regrowing limbs. and it could lay the groundwork for treating humans.

Dr. Josh Curry is a biologist at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. His lab studies axolotal salamanders, and he's a senior author on this research. Hello and welcome to our show. Thanks for having me, Bob. It's great to chat. First of all, what capability do we humans have to regrow tissue naturally? Yeah, it's really a spectrum depending on what part of your body you are pointing at, our skin and our intestines turn over at a really astounding rate. But as far as our appendages go, we don't have a lot of ability to regrow in. And really like the mice that we used in this study,

actually, humans do have the ability to regenerate the tips of their fingers. So if you lose your fingertip, your chances of regrowing it are pretty good. And, you know, usually that works out better for folks that are younger versus us old folks. But if you go just a little bit beyond the nail bed, unfortunately, you're much less likely. And that applies to mice and humans. Well, tell me about the animals that you studied. Why did you choose those three? Yeah. They really represent kind of unique regenerative abilities and unique experimental models. My colleague Kempas, who is now at University of Wisconsin, he studies zebrafish. And these are really a strong experimental model. They can regenerate a lot of structures. What we were thinking about was the

fins, which are kind of the evolutionary precursors of limbs. And my colleague David Brown, who's a plastic surgeon, was interested in mice as kind of a close proxy for humans. And as a mammal, they have this kind of similar property of regeneration that I was just describing. And then axolotles, these salamanders, are kind of somewhere in the middle. They're aquatic, kind of like a zebrafish. They're amazing regenerators. And they have limbs that look a lot like ours. They have an upper limb, a lower limb with two bones, a wrist and a hand. So their ability to regenerate limbs, salamanders in general, they're really the only

limed animals that can fully regenerate. So you're saying the oxalados can regrow a complete limb? You mean like with skin, bone, muscle, all of it? Yeah, everything. Wow. If there's a resection or amputation anywhere along the access all the way from the elbow to the fingertip, they really only replace the part that's missing. So they don't just kind of restart the whole process of making a limb,

but they really pick up right at the point where they need to regenerate just the missing tissue. So it's really incredible the amount of, I would say, intelligence behind what cells and molecules are able to do right at the place of amputation. Well, how did you investigate the genetics, behind this limb regeneration. As I mentioned, we were kind of working as these three independent labs, we're each working on our own organism. My colleague, Kempas, using the strong genetics of zebrafish, were able to identify these, really these two genes called SP6 and SP8.

And these are transcription factors, meaning that in a cell, they live in the nucleus, and they're turning on genes. And so they identified this SP6 and SP8 as genes that are in the skin of the regenerating zebrafish fin. And so that kind of set David, who works on mouse digits and I off to look in our own organisms. And what we found is that in the axolotal and in the mouse, SP6 and SP8, these same genes are in the regenerating skin of both the mouse digit and the axelotal limb. That was really good evidence that maybe this is a common pathway that all these

organisms are using in order to regenerate. Well, how do those genes actually work to reconstruct something as complicated as a limb? These genes in particular, again, they're transcription factors. So they're basically in the nucleus. They're sitting on DNA. And they're basically deciding what genes need to be turned on or turned off. And they're in the regenerating skin that kind of covers this regenerating tissue. really it's there to act as kind of a signaling center to kind of provide cues for the underlying

tissue, the things that will become muscle and bones and tendons, what to do and how to grow. And so what we think is happening is that without these genes, the underlying tissue is not receiving the same kinds of cues to proliferate to pattern into the correct tissues. And that's actually what we saw when we got rid of these in both. the axolot and in the mouse. Oh, I see. So these genes aren't doing the repair work themselves. They're sort of like a foreman at a construction site that says, okay, you carpenters, you go work over there, you concrete porers, you work over here. They're orchestrating the repair. Correct. Yeah. So they're there really just kind of guiding the process along and making sure that cells underneath have the right

cues in order to grow and pattern into the right tissues. So what does this mean then for the potential of using gene therapy like this to help restore lost limbs in humans? Yeah. So I think the guiding principle that we had in this project was that if these transcription factors, if these genes are acting as orchestrators, and they're providing certain cues to the underlying tissue, perhaps something like a gene therapy could be used to kind of substitute, either induce maybe this kind of orchestrative skin or perhaps substitute for it in its absence. So in places where the skin doesn't naturally turn on SP6 or SP8, maybe we could substitute for some of the factors that regenerative skin would normally provide. Well, at the moment, the most common way to replace a limb is with prosthetics,

artificial limbs. So how would this gene therapy fit in with that? I am asked often, you know, do I think it's feasible to regrow a limb? And I do think it's going to be a multi-disciplinary problem to solve. That it is going to take people from many different realms, people working in synthetic biology, people working in tissue engineering and tissue printing, and people working in stem cell biology and even gene therapy in order to all come together and create solutions that really can generate full appendages. You know, an axolotl's limb is only a few millimeters to centimeters, but a human limb, as we're talking about, you know, feet. It really will take a lot of interdisciplinary work to make a solution that is feasible and speedy enough. Dr. Curry, thank you so

much for your time. Yeah, it was great chatting with you. Dr. Josh Curry is an assistant professor of biology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. In celebration of our 50th anniversary, we've been pulling up tape of old shows and listening for gems. Sometimes an interview evokes memories of a specific time or place. Other times I'm struck by the way a scientist seems to anticipate the future. Dr. Isaac Asimov was one of those people. He could see where advances in science. and technology might take us, and the questions that came with them. Dr. Asimov was perhaps

best known as a science fiction writer, but he was also a professor of biochemistry and wrote nonfiction and popular science books, and he was a frequent guest on Quarks and Quarks in its early years. In 1986, just after the show celebrated its 10th anniversary, then host Jay Jay Ingram telephoned Dr. Asimov in New York to ask him what the most important. scientific word had been in the last decade and what the most important word might be in the next 10 years. Now, I won't give away his answers, but take a listen. You might be surprised by how familiar they sound. Here's Dr. Isaac Asimov talking with host Jay Ingraham in 1986. I think that the most important science word of the last 10 years is robot. It's not a brand new word.

It hasn't been coined just recently. But has a... come to have new meaning and new significance over the last 10 years. What do you mean exactly by robots? Robots we see today are very primitive as compared to the usual robots in science fiction. The robots in science fiction generally look like human beings, roughly, even when they're made of metal, and can generally speak and hear and mimic human beings. So far, all we've got in the, in industry, are computerized levers.

Now, why would you say robots is the most important science where it is opposed to, I suspect, many others that could have been likely candidates? Well, in my opinion, you see, the robots are rapidly going to become more advanced, and they're going to take over more and more functions and jobs that until now is strictly human. If we can get robots to do them, human beings will be forced. to work on jobs that really make use of their creative potential. Of course, it means that we have to completely reorganize our educational system to encourage creativity,

and also we have to go through a painful transition period, because before robots can free human beings to be creative, they are afraid will free human beings to join the unamborrable. employment lines. Dr. Asimov, when you coined the three laws of robotics, they revolved around actual physical threat to human beings and the fact that the robots had to obey laws that prohibited them from harming human beings. Do you think that might ever come to pass that we need laws like that? Well, it'll have to.

Ever since human beings have been using tools, we have always tried to use tools with built-in safeguards. Knives have handles. Swords have hilts. And the three laws of robotics are really three laws of tools. The first law says a robot may not harm a human being or through inaction allow human beings to come to harm. That's just like saying a tool must be safe to use. And the second law is that a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where that would conflict with the first law. And that's the law. And that's, saying a tool must be usable for the purpose for which is intended, as long as it can be done safely. And the third law of robotics is a robot must protect its own existence, except where

that would conflict with the first and second law. And that's just like saying a tool must endure, unless the endurance must be broken for the sake of doing its job or protecting human beings. So I think that eventually robots will have the three laws built into them. However, that time has not yet come. The robots that are used nowadays are so simple and primitive. There's no way of building the three laws into them, and we must build them outside them, like fencing them off with chain fences or having currents which will fail safe

in case something goes wrong and so on. Okay, Dr. Asimov, if robot is the word, the science word of the last 10 years, what about the next 10 years? Any ideas? Oh, I would like to see whatever term they use for the space station. Right now, you call it a space station. But if once they start building one, they should discover another word for it, one that comes into use, then I would nominate that one for the word of the next 10 years. Failing that, I'll take the phrase space station. You think the space station is the big future science and technology object? I hope so. I would like to see space explored and exploited for a number of reasons. First, because it'll give us a new and better source of energy in the form of solar power, collected in space.

It'll give us more materials because of perhaps a mining station on the moon, and then finally it'll give us a huge project that may be too large for any single nation so that all of humanity, all the nations together, will have something to concentrate on, the exploitation of space. Well, thanks very much, Dr. Asimov. You're welcome. That was Dr. Isaac Asimov on our episode from July 12, 1986. Now, as I look ahead, my word for the future would be dark, dark matter and dark energy.

There is stuff out there among the stars and between galaxies that we can't see, yet it has a strong influence on the shape of the universe. That's dark matter, and Canadian scientists are trying to determine what it is. Dark energy is a mysterious force that's causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. No one knows what either of these are, yet together they make up 95% of the universe. In other words, we and everything, we see in our telescopes are only 5% of what's really out there. That's a lot to miss.

I'm Bob McDonald, and you're listening to Quarks and Quarks on CBC Radio 1 and streaming live on the CBC News app. Just go to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, how the mutations we acquire over our lifetime can be harnessed to make us healthier. It's really interesting because we can actually learn from these corrections and develop drugs based on them, like mimic them in people that don't spontaneously acquire them. I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit.

But things are pretty good. That is until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The truish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me. And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are. Personally, discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. The genetic instructions you get from your parents are not the same as the instructions you're left with when you die. Far from it.

The cells in our bodies are hotbeds of mutation. These are genetic mistakes that can have devastating consequences. like when they give rise to cancer, but they're also essential for our survival. And there's an evolutionary battle occurring within us between our cells, where random mutations can give one cell a leg up, allowing it to out-compete the others. And the more scientists learn about these mutations that we acquire over a lifetime, the closer they're getting to leveraging those changes for the benefit of our health. That's the idea behind a new book by Canadian science journalist Roxanne Comzi from Montreal.

It's called Beyond Inheritance, our ever-mutating cells and a new understanding of our health. Hello and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you, Bob. It's so great to be here. Now, we all grew up learning that the DNA we inherit from our parents is our genetic blueprint. So to what extent can that change within our lives? Yeah, I grew up learning the same thing. You inherit one set of instructions from mom and one set from dad, and then you have kind of two copies of each gene in your cells, and that's cookie cutter all the same throughout

your body. But what I found out as I was writing this book is that our DNA is changing every single day. We are picking up changes in the 3 billion letters of our genome as you and I are talking, as people are listening, and that can have different effects on how. how our health plays out over time. So we are this kind of landscape of evolution where cells are evolving as we go through our life. What's causing the changes? Well, you know, you and I, we were both one cell for the first 24 hours of our life. And then after that, we became two cells and then four cells. By day five, we're 100 cells with a hollow center. And each time

that cells divide, and there's a lot of cell division that happens in the body, there's a chance for errors to kind of creep in. Imagine if I gave you a book and there were three billion letters that you had to copy by hand. I'm sure, you know, you're a great transcriber, but maybe there would be one or two errors that would creep in. And that's what cells are doing all of the time. And when they're doing that during our growth in the womb, they're doing it so fast. We have to grow a foot, an arm, you know, a brain. And so cells make mistakes.

And those mistakes kind of like they linger, right? They don't always get corrected. And also, there's just wear and tear happening when cells are in our own bodies, our adult bodies, which have 30 to 40 trillion human cells. You know, we've got to replace our blood cells. Now that it's summer, I'm being more active. I might fall off my bike and scrape my elbow, and we've got to replace those skin cells. So all this turnover is opportunity for mistakes to happen. Now, when we bring up the word mutation, that usually refers to things that are negative to our health,

But is that always the case? Absolutely not. So part of the reason I wrote this book was to change people's mind about mutation. So as you kind of have alluded to, I think, that there's obviously cases where mutations are devastating. Like they drive cancer. They drive all sorts of inherited disorders as well. But in the case of our immunity, we actually have to have mutation in order to defend against pathogens. So I don't know if you recall, we had a pathogen.

pandemic not that long ago. And we all encountered a virus that our bodies had never seen before. And how did they like adapt in order to make the antibodies we needed to fight that never before seen virus? Well, what happened is that the DNA inside our immune cells are going through this kind of constant rejiggering. Like imagine the DNA is kind of like going to Vegas where you pull the lever on the slot machine and things kind of shake up a little bit. They're doing that inside its DNA and every time they do that, they come up with a new shape of antibody. And luckily for us, when they find the right shape of antibody that can bind and neutralize the viruses we encounter, they start making more of it.

And Bob, I should say that there are some people that actually lack the ability to have mutating immune cells. One of the conditions is called hyper-IGM syndrome. And people that have this disorder, they need all sorts of infusions, sometimes a bone marrow transplant, without that they have to live in a bubble, and oftentimes in the past and decades past, they wouldn't survive past infancy simply because their immune cells couldn't mutate to make new kinds of antibodies. Wow.

So what does it mean at the cellular level if there's molecular evolution happening where some cells mutate in a way that gives them an advantage over their neighbors? Well, in the case of cancer, it's a terrible thing, right? Like you'll have those cancer cells get a leg up and metastasize and grow throughout the body. And ultimately that can lead to death. Also, in a lot of blood disorders, so there's certain times of anemia where cells that are not quite right will kind of begin to outnumber others. You know, it's kind of like, as we might imagine happening in nature, it's happening in our own bodies. Like imagine Darwin came back to life now and he had a microscope.

he would be fascinated by the competition that's happening between cells. And in fact, about one in 10 to two in 10 people over the age of 70 have these mutant blood cells in their bodies that are linked to a doubled risk of heart attack and stroke. So I really think it's important for everybody to understand how our thinking about DNA has changed, has evolved, if you will, because we have to grasp this in order to kind of understand how doctors are now talking about our health risks. Well, you have a lot of case studies in your book, and one of them is about a girl named Australia,

who got a heart transplant, and scientists discovered that her heart condition was caused by mutations in some of her heart cells. What happened there? Yeah, so this is a story of Estrea. Her parents, basically, she was their third child. This happened about 13 years ago. And her mother, when she was pregnant,

they said, we have to monitor, you pretty closely towards this end of this pregnancy, we're not sure this baby's heart is functioning properly. And so she had an emergency C-section towards the end of her pregnancy, and when Australia was born, her parents didn't even see her immediately. She was whisked away to the neonatal intensive care unit, and there she had a heart attack. Doctors thought she had something called Long QT syndrome, which was at the time thought to be an inherited disorder only. It's kind of like a bad rhythm of the heart. It causes all sorts of bad things.

But when they tested her mom and dad, they found that they did not possess the mutation. So they took a closer look at Estreya's cells. They could sequence 36 of them. They kind of did this individual cell sequencing, which is kind of new at the time. And they found that about six of the 36 had the mutation for long QT syndrome, but the rest didn't. So it was a mystery. When I went home, she got this defibrillator implanted in her heart. And when she was around seven months old, it was a Friday, and her mother got a call, she

was home with her daughter. And they said, you have to bring your daughter into the hospital right away because they were monitoring her heart function. And Estreya's mother looked at her, she was, my daughter's sleeping in the club, are you sure? And they were like, you have to come in right away. So they brought her in and they're at the hospital, Estreya had another heart attack because they were picking up on signals that something wasn't right.

And eventually she had to have a heart transplant. And the good news is that she's doing fine today. But Bob, the opportunity that gave scientists was to look at her heart and they confirmed that a lot of her heart tissue had the long QT syndrome. And this changed people's conception of whether all these diseases we thought were always inherited are inherited. The fact is that they figured out that Estreya had picked up this mutation during her embryonic development.

So, you know, we've entered this whole new age. of genetics where genetic diseases are not always inherited. Wow, and development is so important during those first few moments of life. Absolutely. So can mutations write a genetic wrong, like sort of autocorrect does for typos? You had a great example of this in your book about a young man with Dushan muscular dystrophy. What happened there? Yeah, so again, like I want to wrap up the negative with the positive.

Like, mutation is not always a bad thing. And there have been increasing number of cases as we've been getting better at sequencing DNA where scientists have kind of been able to explain these mysterious cases where people are supposed to get sicker, but they don't. So there was an instance where there was a boy who had Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a devastating genetic disorder where your muscle tissue kind of loses function and it affects the heart, at least a premature death. he was doing okay. And so when they looked more closely at him, one side of his body had actually

picked up a corrective mutation that kind of compensated for the devastating Duchenne muscular dystrophy mutation. And you can actually see this in other disorders, like you can visually see it in people that have epidermalysis bolosa, which is an inherited disorder where you kind of have extremely fragile skin and something that might, you know, like I was talking about falling off my bike and hit scraping my elbow. For somebody with this disorder, those wounds don't heal. They become very infected and sometimes lethal, but they've actually seen multiple cases where people's skin kind of just develops spontaneous mutations that correct that disorder.

And so instead of this red, flaky, infected skin, they have just patches of healthy skin that continue to grow over time. So it's really interesting because we can actually learn from these corrections and develop drugs based on them, like mimic them in people that don't spontaneously. acquire them. Well, how can our understanding of this landscape of mutations, as you call it, that we acquire during our lives, help us improve health? So I think there are multiple ways in which understanding how all of this mutation is happening in our body can help us treat disease. One of them is in cancer, right, which affects everybody. And in cancer, you've got thousands of

mutations happening in a tumor. They used to think it was just one or two. But now doctors see that there is potentially a big bang of mutations that happens early on in cancers that seeds all these different DNA changes that can make the cancers more lethal. But knowing about the landscape of evolution in the body can actually help us to nudge cancers in a direction where they're much easier to treat. Well, you talk about this in your book with a Florida case of Robert Butler, whose doctor was inspired by how pesticides are used to leverage. evolutionary forces for treatment. What's the concept there? So what's happening now is that doctors in Florida at the Moffet Center, so Robert Butler is a fabulous person I met in 2018, and he was on this new protocol for prostate cancer patients where they knew about this case where there was a diamond back moth, which was like decimating

crops like Brussels sprouts. And they figured out that like you couldn't really knock out all the moths completely, but what you could do is you could kind of strategically take away pesticides and add it back in a way that reduce the populations tremendously. So we're trying to do the same thing with cancer where you're not necessarily trying to eradicate it, but you're trying to like make it so that you live as long as possible by reducing the number of cells with the bad mutations in the cancer and keeping the ones that have the mutations that are like less bad that you can more easily kill with treatment.

So it sounds like instead of trying to kill everything, they just kill enough so not all cancer cells die. Exactly. And it's a bit of a mind shift, right? Because like most people want everything to be just gone. But the idea here is that you can actually live longer by not pressuring the cancer to evolve those terrible mutations that make it resistant to all drugs. So you're kind of managing the disease. And I think, you know, Robert Butler, he lived longer than expected for somebody with prostate. cancer. He actually authored some science papers with the scientists working on this itself. And he was very much an advocate for this. He was like, I would rather, you know, live longer and just embrace the idea that like, that's how I'm going to do. I'm going to kind of like extend my life by just not pressuring the tumors to evolve the resistance mutations that

are so aggressive and really kind of precipitate a rapid decline, which is what often happens when people have late stage prostate cancer like he did back in 2018. So we're trying to eliminate the resistance that can arise in cancer, resistance to the drugs, so that they still have the disease, but they live longer. Absolutely. So what often is what kills people with cancer is that the drugs don't work anymore, that their cancers have kind of acquired mutations that allow them to resist the drugs that are being used to treat them. And that's when things get really dire. So this whole approach is to kind of avoid that happening and push it off as far off into the future as possible. possible by giving the cells and the cancer that are more drug-sensitive kind of a leg up over the ones that are more prone to kind of become more nefarious.

Well, genetic medicine has made huge strides in the past decades. What are some of the more interesting ways scientists are trying to correct these genetic mutations that happen throughout our lives? I think one of the most fascinating things, and I have to tread carefully here, is that we're kind of getting this new understanding of aging as a disease of mutation. And that was completely new to me. Like I never thought that aging would be a problem of mutation. But the idea is that you and me, everybody here on Earth, we have mass mutations. And as we get older, they've kind of piled up inside our bodies. And that that causes some dysfunction. Now, scientists from the University of Rochester had gone to the northernmost part of Alaska

and looked at bowhead whales, which live much longer than we do. So they've been documented to live more than 220 years and are estimated to live 275 years. They're the longest living mammals on Earth. And when they looked at their cells, they found that they had an abundance of DNA repair enzyme. So enzymes that go around the genome kind of fixing mistakes. And the theory is that maybe the animals that live longer just have better DNA repair mechanisms.

So of course now, companies are starting to explore different ways of kind of. kind of like correcting our DNA, different enzymes that might do this function that may be used as therapies in the future. I think it's really early days. I don't think this is something I would take on a daily basis because I think there might be some downsides. But it's interesting to think about how our DNA repair might be leveraged to kind of improve longevity. So I guess the lesson here is that yes, we may be mutating continually throughout our lives, but they're not all bad. In fact, I guess we need some of them because that's how a species evolves. Exactly, right?

So, like, if somebody said, hey, Roxanne, I'm going to give you a drug to make you live longer. It's going to repair all your DNA. It's going to not let your DNA mutate. I would have a moment of pause because I would say, well, hey, like, if my DNA can't mutate and there's another new virus out there, how is my body going to know or have a mechanism to make different antibodies it's never made before? So there's kind of two sides of the coin. Our livers are constantly getting insulted by things like the alcohol we drink, and they actually mutate to process calories better. It's been documented than in people that have fatty liver disease.

There's actually islands of liver cells in their bodies that develop ways of coping with excess calories better. So we're kind of this laboratory of change, and I'm not sure I would take a drug that says I couldn't change at all. Ms. Kamsi, thank you so much for your time, and thank you for the moment. book. Thank you, Bob. It's been such a pleasure to talk with you. Roxanne Camsey is a science journalist in Montreal and the author of Beyond Inheritance, our ever-mutating cells and a new understanding of our health. The way water vapor in our upper atmosphere turns into rain or snow might be a lot more interesting than we ever imagine. We used to think water vapor clung to microscopic particles, like dust, pollen, or salt through a process called nucleation.

to form heavier water droplets or ice crystals that fall as precipitation. But a recent study is shedding light on the role microorganisms, fungi of all things, might play in that process. The discovery was made by a chemist who studies the proteins that help microorganisms survive the extreme cold by either preventing or promoting ice growth. Dr. Conrad Meister was working in Alaska when someone asked him if he ever had ever been, thought about looking for such proteins in lichen, which can survive extreme cold. He discovered a fungal protein with an incredible capacity to freeze water at relatively warm temperatures, but more surprising is that they may be involved in making rain. These fungal proteins might

even be an environmentally friendly way to seed clouds to trigger rain or snow. Dr. Meister is a Biosophysical Chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany and Boise State University in Idaho. Hello and welcome to our program. Thanks, Bob, for having me. It's very exciting. Let's start with the Lichens. What did you see in these Likens in Alaska that piqued your interest? Well, first of all, I've never heard of Lichen and I had this very talented student that pointed out these, what I first was, plans. And the very unique thing was that even in the deepest winter in Alaska, when you look at them, then they look kind of almost dry and frozen, but once it get warm again, they get all these fleshy leaves again, and they just looked

very much alive again. And that I found very, very odd how a living organism could just kind of like hop on and hop off of this frozen and non-frozen or dormant and active state. I thought that was super, super peculiar. Now, lichen, are they fungi? What is a lichen? From the traditional picture, a lichen is what's called a symbiosis of a fungi which basically providing all the structural content, and then a cyanobacteria oftentimes or an algae that basically does the photosynthesis. So you can think about it. One is providing the structure and one is providing the food.

Wow. Well, how did you find that the fungi in the lichen could make water freeze at a higher temperature? We originally tested the entire lichen sample. So think about it like a salad leaf. We took the entire salad leaf and then we crushed it up and we tested if that has some special ice activities. It did. And then we did basically what we call subculture and we took and we looked at everything that grew off this little piece of what looked like a salad leaf. And then we started subculturing and we got, I think, 40, 50 different microorganisms that lived on them.

And all of them we tested. And then we ended up with this one winning candidate that had these phenomenal ice activities. So what was it about that one particular fungus that allows it to produce ice or, as you say, have phenomenal ice activities? It was already known that some fungi had this capability of being very, very good at ice making. But the question was always how and what does the trick. And what we figured out is basically that these fungi produce a special protein, like a special natural ice making agent. And the really neat thing is that they basically release that into the environment. So it can just be found, let's say, in the water droplet.

And this is really stunning because now we have a way to know what does it. So we know the structure and we can try to copy that structure. But even more importantly, we can also start to produce that because this is, of course, very, very interesting if it comes to potential applications. Oh, I see. So you're saying this fungus produces a protein, this ice-making agent, as you say, So how does this nucleation process work? How does it work to form ice?

We all know that we put water or beer in the freezer. And it's not immediately freezing, right? It's what's called super cool. So it needs something to kind of kick off that freezing process. And the compounds that can do that the best, they actually do that by creating like a pattern that almost looks like ice. So if you look at these natural ice-making agents, they're actually from like really the tiny molecular level, they almost look like ice,

meaning they place these residues that all have oxygen and hydrogen similar to water, and they put them in a certain order so that it really enables the water to preferentially go into the ice state rather than the liquid state, if that makes sense. Oh, I see. Water is H2O, hydrogen and oxygen. So these little proteins have hydrogen and oxygen that matches the water, sort of like a template? Exactly. That's pretty much on the molecular picture how it works. Okay. So what pushes the water over the edge to go from liquid to solid form?

So if you think about it in a dancing way, so it's like liquid water, so if water's in liquid state, it's almost like club dancing. It's very wild. They move a lot. And then if we now at these ice making agents, these water dance more like, let's see, these old school middle age dances where they all have very, very well the form. find patterns, and then you just need a critical mass of water molecule. So if we have enough of these proteins and the surface area is enough. So if enough of them dance in the same way, that's when it basically going to start this nucleation process, and all of them are all of a sudden going to start dancing. If that makes sense? Yeah, I think so. I'm thinking about these water molecules swimming around your dance analogy. If everyone's dancing freely, that would be the liquid state. And then if everyone joins hands and makes a ring or something and dances together, that's the ice.

That's exactly what I mean by that, yes. Okay, so your fungal agents here, they're the ones that grab the hands first and say, here, hold on. Exactly. They are basically forcing the first two people to like, you two hold hands, and now everyone else should join in. That's remarkable. So this is all happening with a fungus that can do this. What would be the evolutionary advantage of a fungus to be able to make ice like that? Yeah, that's still a very much open question, and it's in a way still unknown, but it's obviously going to help the fungal for survival. These lichens where you can see the fungus, and that is basically when the lichen wants to go into a dormant state or the fungus wants to go into a dormant

state, when it knows there's not enough food or there's enough nutrition around, it's a very gentle process to dehydrate us, because if I start freezing outside my body, my water is slowly going to move out of me and I'm in a good sleepy state and then if there's enough water and nutrition's around I will just kind of like revive myself. Another idea is that they could use it to basically get around. Let's say I live on this leaf on this lichen and it's all packed and it's just like you know what I actually would prefer living outside this packed city I want to go live on the countryside but how does the fungus get there? And so one idea is okay we know that fungi or bioazole, virus, they can go all the way up in the atmosphere. But if I can now make ice,

I actually have a way to get down. Wow. So what role do you think they play in actually making rain and snow? We find these fungi and sometimes bacteria, and we find them in precipitation, whether it's rain or snow. When you do samplings in the clouds, you also find the fungi and the bacteria. What you also need in the cloud in order to get precipitation, so if we wanted to snow or rain, in these mixed-faced clouds, we need ice nucleation. So we need this process that we just talked about, that these fungi are good. And now it's just like, okay,

you're telling me that we have these super good ice-making microbes and you find them in the clouds and you find them on the ground. That cannot be a coincidence. So there might be some biopreciprecipitation circle that's going on. And that opens a new can of worms, I guess you say, because now we have to look for additional players in the game that could potentially influence that. So are you saying that fungi on the ground are getting up into the atmosphere and producing their own rain?

I cannot 100% prove that at this point, but that's my theory, yes. Wow. So what kind of applications could this ice nucleating ability be good for? So there's a couple of different ones. If you have something that's very good at freezing at very warm temperatures, like that'd be great for artificial snowmaking. So folks are looking into that. Then cloud seeding is another very big one. Because there we currently cloud seed with silver iodide, which is a chemical and if you find a environmental-friendly alternative,

it'd be much, much nicer. But really one can think also about a lot of these cryopreservation and food preservation purposes, because at the end of the day, we now have a product that comes from a fungi and it's a protein, so it's a clean product, and that always got to freeze at the same temperature. Richard, it's going to be very useful for basically anything you want to freeze and you want to have consistency when something freezes. Dr. Meister, thank you so much for your time.

Absolute, Bob. Thanks so much for having me. Dr. Conrad Meister is a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Germany, an assistant professor of biophysical chemistry at Boise State University in Idaho. And that's it for Quarks and Quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx. CBC.ca. Our webpage is cbc.ca.ca. slash quirks, where you can check out our past episodes and find more information on the research we covered in the show. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quarks and Quarks is produced by Sonia Biting, Rosie Fernandez, and Amanda Bukowitz. Our senior producer is

Hannah Hoag. Special thanks to CBC Radio Archives, Patrick Mooney, Ross Tolly, and Zoe Barakloff, and to Chris McIntyre from CBC Yukon. I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.