Could I ask what would qualify as good advice on deciding whether a paper was related to the grant? I have had a PO get very nervous and ask for serious explanations when they found out I had planned a second grant to be cited on a paper, so I try to be very cautious about this, and I am curious.

Bummed I had to miss this. Did it get recorded?

Thanks! We are definitely looking forward to see more of your work on the mussel #TransCan!

And we have more to come--understanding disease transmission, identifying new outbreaks of transmissible cancer, and several different strategies to find the genetic mechanisms behind the evolution of resistance to cancer in this unique and exciting system!

(If we still have a lab...)

Each of the 3 first authors were awesome techs who ran the project for over a year, and all 3 are now PhD students! Rachael Giersch (UO), Jordana Sevigny (UCSC), and Sydney Weinandt (UAB). Huge effort from everyone involved and I am excited to see it all come together.

Overall, this was the culmination of a long effort, especially if you count 2020, in which we were conveniently running a year-long experiment to test different clam maintenance conditions, once we realized that we needed to keep clams alive for a lot longer than we had thought initially.

And because it is BlueSky I have to include the dual axis plot of representative clams from each outcome type comparing cancer fraction over time (lines) with eDNA detection (dots).

We also tested the tank water for eDNA to see when cancer cells are released by sick clams. We found 2 phases: an early phase <24% cancer without much transmission and an infectious phase >24% cancer with BTN eDNA detected in water, released in bursts and correlated with disease severity.

We also saw the timing of progression could have a long delay and was highly variable, and we even saw progress in a few clams initially diagnosed as negative, showing that there can be a long latent period when the cancer cells engraft into tissues and stay/grow there, before being seen in lymph.

Progression is clear, and we show it is associated with early death, but the surprising thing was that cancer did not progress in about half of animals, which suggests evolution of resistance in these populations after the earlier severe outbreaks.

We found a lot of variability, but saw three main outcomes: Progression to Death, Long-Term Non-Progression, and Regression.

To determine how transmissible cancers really affect clams in New England now, we maintained clams collected from the wild in individual tanks in the lab and followed the cancer with qPCR of their hemolymph every 2 weeks for up to a year to quantify the fraction of BTN cells at each time.

It was reported to be lethal and had been reported to cause severe population die-offs in the 80s and 2000s. But there were some older reports of regression, and during other experiments we anecdotally noticed one of the clams in our lab showed a very clear case of cancer growth and then regression.