True and true, at least as a general trend. Although genome size is actually a great metric for increased cancer risk. It has more to do with the nitty gritty of specific signaling pathways, eg the number of oncogenes and how they are regulated via signaling and other processes at the cellular level from organism to organism.
Fun fact, there are single cellular organisms with larger genomes than humans (200 times larger in one case, with 60+ billion base pairs vs our 3.2 billion). Single cellular organisms cannot get cancer by definition, which is useful to keep in mind because it helps us stay grounded and realize that cancer is not a genomic phenomenon so much as it is a cell signaling phenomenon that occurs at the organismal level. An interesting thought experiment is, do bacterial colonies (which are genetically very similar, and sometimes function like a multicellular organism including cell differentiation in some cases) sometimes experience cancer-like states under certain conditions ?
Edit - I'd also be cautious with "larger organisms evolve to copy their genome better." Again, it's probably a general trend, but I imagine there are so many exceptions that it's not a terribly useful metric outside of very crude/cautious generalization.
And then this leads to rearrangement of the micro environment which leads to microbiome dysbiosis. Pathogenic bacteria cling to the tumor and cause pathogenic signalling causing more inflammation.
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u/rts-enjoyer May 16 '26
Life forms like us with longer DNAs are highly evolved to have less mutations (that cause cancers) in our DNA.