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Scientists have sequenced the largest known animal genome — and it’s 30 times bigger than the human genome.

The genome belongs to the South American lungfish (Lepidosiren paradoxa), a primeval, air-breathing fish that “hops” onto land from the water using weird, limb-like fins. The fish’s DNA code expanded dramatically over the past 100 million years of evolutionary history, racking up the equivalent of one human genome every 10 million years, researchers found.

During the Cold War Era of the 1960s, Russian researchers were looking for ways to support the immune system in conditions running the gamut from cancer to bio-warfare agents. Eastern Europeans, with a cultural love of fermented milk products, logically looked to probiotics, or lactobacillus, for immune support because it was safe, cheap and effective.

A Bulgarian researcher and medical doctor, Dr. Ivan Bogdanov, researched lactobacillus bacteria in the 1960s. Bogdanov believed that specific strains of probiotics could have anti-tumor properties.

The doctor’s research team injected mice with a sarcoma cancer, then administered a crude mixture of cell fragments from a strain of Lactobacillus delbrukii. Bogdanov observed that the cancer disappeared within a few days. Subsequently, researchers attempted to re-grow cancer in the same mice, but without success — the mice seemed immune to the cancer cells.