Mutant wolves roaming the deserted streets of Chernobyl appear to have developed resistance to cancer - raising hopes the findings can help scientists fight the disease in humans.

A nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine in 1986 - with more than 100,000 people evacuated from the city as the blast released cancer-causing radiation.

Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University in the US, has been studying how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite generations of exposure to radioactive particles.

Ms Love and a team of researchers visited the CEZ in 2014 and put radio collars on the wolves so that their movements could be monitored.

The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives - which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human.

Ms Love presented her findings at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle, Washington, last month.

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