The long and curious life of the world’s oldest naked rat

Joe has seen dynasties rise and fall. He and his colony partners have spent years cleaning the nest, caring for the queen, and protecting her from being named an employee or joining as xenophobic soldiers. Most have a fairly healthy life. Because they live in deep holes in the desert, mole rats have few natural predators.

So what he does to kill a naked mole rat? “They beat each other up,” says veterinarian pathologist Martha Delaney of the University of Illinois. Naked rat mice are extreme xenophobes. They will attack outsiders, push and bite each other, and expel members of the colony as expelled.

“They’re beautiful animals,” Melissa Holmes says honestly. Holmes is a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Toronto who works with more than 1,000 naked rats. The internal functioning of the strange eusocial structure of mole rats achieves the popularity of the attack. “But they are very stable for animals that live in such large groups,” he says.

Holmes is 12 years old in his colony. “And in some of my colonies we’ve never had any injuries,” he says. “That’s amazing. Animals live together with this lack of aggression for years.”

There are no naked rats that never get old or get sick. They do. But their bodies somehow slow down these processes. While typical mammalian bones are more fragile and thinner over the years, the bones of the mole rat are maintained they remain the same and solid mineral content. People get more fat with age. Sator naked rats? No.

“But the most striking system,” says Buffenstein, “is the cardiovascular system.” Human veins and arteries usually harden over time. The more rigid these walls are, the harder it is for the heart to pump. Blood pressure rises. Risk of death goes up. Mole naked rats survive blood vessels. “Not all of the measures we looked at in heart function have changed from six months to 24 years,” he says.

In humans, heart disease is the leading cause of death. Cancer is secondary. About 40 percent They develop cancer in the lives of people in the United States. In naked mice rats, the probability is less than 1 percent. In A 2008 study, Buffenstein did not report cancer in the 800 mole rat group. As of 2021, Buffenstein says he has found only five cancers in more than 3,000 autopsies.

“They age very well,” Delaney says. “They’re very well-shaped. It’s like a physiological miracle.” Delaney mainly examines naked rat moles in zoos, biopsies and tissue fragments to test how they died. He found a couple of cancers in two naked rat mice (“after evaluating hundreds and hundreds,” he says). The cancer was not fatal either. Naked rat mice develop kidney and brain injuries with age, but rarely become a disease.

This unexpected resistance means that it could be something we humans can catch in the form of pills or perhaps one day as gene therapy in their biology. “And that’s why I think they’re so popular now,” Delaney says, “not only as a model for researching age-related diseases.” Known or not, the real reward remains elusive.

Scientists want it order what to change in our biology to mimic the duration of the mole rat. Get cancer. Mole rats are great for preventing cancer because researchers believe their cells can take cables with protective molecules that stop mutated cells before taking them. For example, naked rat cells contain a large amount of protein called p53, which of course eliminates tumors. Last year, Buffenstein reported that he showed up 10 times more in their connective tissue than in humans and mice — and is more stable.