Title says it all really. It seems that us mammals can develop cancer of just about anything and everything.

I have a garden, and many house plants, but I don't see "leaf cancer" or "bud carcinoma" etc. discussed in the books or horticulural sites I use. Yet plants have dividing cells, and can live for hundreds or even thousands of years?

I am aware that "galls" are sometimes referred too as cancer, but really, they are bacterial or fungal infection, not a "self gone mad" thing.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

Maybe you'll find this site helpful: http://plantpathology.tamu.edu/TexLab/index.htm

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I spent quite a while browsing that site, which is not ideally structured for this kind of question. That site, and a few others I've browsed would tend to suggest the answer is "no".

Odd that, isn't it.

I've decided to research this a little more...

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

Hi adrian,

according to a friend of mine, who leads a research programme on plant (especially crop) resistence against diseases and pests, there are no known forms of plant cancer comparable to cancer in animals.

There are just those forms of uncontrolled growth induced by infections, pest damage or toxins like Colchicine you mentioned but not any autoinduced reasons like mutations or defective biochemical pathways.

Regards,

Christoph

Generally I think cancer occurs the most in fast-reproducing cells, and plants tend to not have as much fast reproduction that animals do.

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but not any autoinduced reasons like mutations or defective biochemical pathways.

I've spent several more hours today researching this, and that is my finding also. Am I alone in finding that odd?

Generally I think cancer occurs the most in fast-reproducing cells, and plants tend to not have as much fast reproduction that animals do.

There are plant species, several bamboo's spring to mind, that can grow 1m per day. I am not aware of any mammals that can do that.

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Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

I don't know if it is odd, but I'm sure that there's a kind of equilibrium in life, reflecting in many "natural shapes" in facing survival.
Human beings are specialized in changing biological habits in a brief time (centuries) when needed, and they can live in nearly all kinds of environment.
This could be the cause of errors like cancer, together with the higher complexity of human genome.
Moreover, there could be other odd differences among human and plant behaviour. For esemple both human beings and plants need water, but if I want some I can go to the fridge and have some, a plant would die, if it doesn't rain or if I don't help it. Is this odd? Could be that plants don't develop cancer at the price of being much simpler than human people.
Life is odd :D

PS: sorry for my english, if I could use the proper words and syntactic structures my ideas would be easier to understand.

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