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[Thomas Park]: They're bald, they're blind, they never get cancer, they are resistant
to low oxygen and they don't feel certain types of pain, for instance, chronic pain.
A lot of people describe them as looking like hot dogs with teeth or sausages with legs.
They are also cold blooded; they live for 30 years, which is 10 times longer than other animals of the same size.
Their teeth stick out through the skin so they can never close their lips around their teeth.
Their living conditions are horrible. They live with huge numbers of individuals, within a colony,
and so the air supply is very limited and they use up much of the oxygen and generate
a huge amount of carbon dioxide. We would find these conditions intolerable.
The research that we do here at the University of Illinois at Chicago is focused on how they’ve
adapted to this low-oxygen, high-carbon dioxide environment that they live in. Their brain
is very protected against low oxygen. It’s taken tens of millions of years to make that
adaptation so they can survive under low oxygen conditions. How can we apply that to ourselves?
Well, in times of crisis like a heart attack or stroke we have low oxygen supply to the brain.
So if we could discover how naked mole-rats have solved this problem we can apply it to
victims of heart attack and stroke. They live under very high carbon dioxide levels.
And so, we are trying to find out how it is that breathing in high levels of carbon dioxide
is not painful. If you’ve ever had a club soda or carbonated beverage
and have a little burp through your nose, it stings like the devil. And that is because of the carbon dioxide
coming into contact with your nasal cavity. The naked mole rats have several adaptations
that make that not painful. The reason that’s important to us is because that pain system
that responds to carbon dioxide is the same one that’s involved in chronic pain.
For people that suffer chronic pain day to day, it would be great if we could come up with
new targets that we could try to use for therapeutic treatment.
In their colonies they designate different parts of their living space for different functions.
So for this colony they decided that this cage right close to me is the home nest and the kitchen
where they do food preparation, food sharing, etc. The next chamber over is the toilet chamber and
it makes sense for animals that are living in a closed environment like this to have one designated toilet for
everyone to share. And then the others are just living chambers.
They live in central east Africa where they are actually considered to be a pest. If a farmer decides to irrigate
a field, the naked mole rats will go underneath of that field, and when the vegetables get ripe,
just like the goofy gophers from our childhood cartoons, they pluck the carrots and potatoes.
Naked mole rats have a very unusual social structure. Within a naked mole rat colony
there could be up to 300 members but only one female breeds and she is referred to as
the queen. She will select two or three males to be her breeding mate and all of the other
adults are non-breeding helpers, divided into two casts.
One is the soldiers, who don't take care of the babies, don't bring food back to the nest, don't clean up any messes,
but if an intruder comes they are on the scene. They will attack the intruder.
The other cast is known as housekeepers. They keep the tunnels clean from debris, they do the majority of
the digging, they carry the babies from place to place, they carry food back to the babies.
All these animals do the bidding of the queen. She makes a circuit through the colony every day,
a couple of times a day, and everybody she meets, she grabs them with her teeth and
gives them a shake so they remember who is in charge.
Ours is not the only lab working on naked mole rats.
There is a group in San Antonio that’s working on longevity and cancer resistance.
There is a group in Berlin that is working on pain insensitivity. There is a group at
Harvard working on genomic aspects and I think that this is going to turn out to be a gold
mine for biologists and biomedical research.