Thesis Subject:
My re­search aims to un­der­stand how trans­miss­ible can­cer cells evade host im­mune de­fenses in mar­ine bi­valves. Ho­ri­zontal trans­miss­ible can­cers are ma­lig­nant clonal cell lin­eages that spread between in­di­vidu­als through the trans­fer of liv­ing can­cer cells, rep­res­ent­ing an ex­treme form of meta­stasis that oc­curs across hosts. A key ques­tion in trans­miss­ible can­cer bio­logy is how can­cer cells over­come host im­mune re­cog­ni­tion and per­sist across ge­net­ic­ally dis­tinct in­di­vidu­als or spe­cies. In my PhD thesis, host im­munity is hy­po­thes­ized to be a cent­ral bar­rier that con­strains BTN per­sist­ence and host range. I in­vest­ig­ate the ge­netic and evol­u­tion­ary basis of im­mune in­ter­ac­tions between cockles and trans­miss­ible can­cers. The main goal is to identify the mo­lecu­lar path­ways and evol­u­tion­ary sig­na­tures that de­term­ine whether cockle im­mune sys­tems re­strict or per­mit the per­sist­ence and cross-spe­cies spread of BTN lin­eages.