The long and strange life of the world’s oldest nude mouse

Joe has seen the rise and fall of dynasties. He and his colonial partners spent many years cleaning the nest, caring for the queen, and preventing intruders from being designated as workers or xenophobic soldiers. Most of them lead relatively healthy lives. And because they live deep in the desert, rats have almost no natural enemies.

So do Kill a naked mole rat? “They beat each other,” said Martha Delaney, a veterinary pathologist at the University of Illinois. Naked mole rats are extreme xenophobes. They will attack outsiders, push and bite each other, and expel exiled members.

“They are cute animals,” Melissa Holmes said sincerely. Holmes is a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, working with more than 1,000 nude mole mice. The inner workings of the strange social structure of mole rats have earned them a reputation for aggression. She said: “But for animals living in such a large group, they are very stable.”

Holmes has a colonial history for twelve years. She said: “In some of my colonies, we have never been harmed.” “This is really surprising-animals have lived together for many years without aggressiveness.”

It’s not that naked mole mice will never age or get sick. They are like this. But their bodies slowed down these processes in some way. Over the years, although the bones of typical mammals have become more fragile and thinner, Mole rat bone retention The same mineral content remains the same. As people grow older, people tend to gain more fat. Naked mole rat? Do not.

Bufenstein said: “But the most striking system is the cardiovascular system.” Human veins and arteries usually stiffen over time. The harder these walls are, the harder it is for the heart to twitch. Blood pressure rises. Risk of death Up. The blood vessels of nude mole rats remain elastic throughout their lives. She said: “From six months to 24 years old, every heart function index we have studied has not changed.”

In humans, heart disease is the main cause of death. Cancer is second.on 40% People in the United States will get cancer throughout their lives. For naked mole mice, the probability of occurrence is much lower than 1%.in A 2008 study, Buffenstein reported that in 800 mole rats, there was no cancer at all. Bufenstein said that as of 2021, she had found only 5 types of cancer in 3,000 autopsies.

“Their age is very good,” Delaney said. “They adapt well, like a physiological miracle.” Delaney mainly studies naked mole rats at the zoo, scanning biopsies and tissue sections to figure out how they died. of. She found several types of cancer in two naked naked mice (“After evaluating hundreds of thousands,” she said). Neither type of cancer is fatal.Naked mole mice do develop kidney with Brain disease With age, it rarely becomes a disease.

This unexpected flexibility means that we may capture certain biological information about humans in the form of pills (or one day as gene therapy). “That’s why I think they are so popular now,” Delaney said, “not only as a research model for cancer, but also as a research model for age-related diseases.” But whether they are popular or not, the real rewards are still elusive.

Scientists think Find out what adjustments to make in our biology to mimic the lifespan of the rat. Accept cancer. Mice are so good at avoiding cancer that researchers believe that their cells may be hardwired with protective molecules, preventing the mutated cells from happening before they can swallow them. For example, naked mole rat cells accumulate a large amount of protein called p53, which is known to inhibit tumors.Last year, Buffenstein reported that they showed Ten times as much It is more stable in connective tissue than in humans and mice.