They are homely, buck-toothed, pink, nearly hairless and just plain weird, but one of the many odd traits of rodents called naked mole-rats that live in subterranean bliss in the deserts of East Africa could someday be of great benefit to people.
Scientists on Thursday said the rodents, when deprived of oxygen in their crowded underground burrows, survive by switching to a unique type of metabolism based on the sugar fructose rather than the usual glucose, the only animal known to do so.
Metabolising fructose is a plant strategy, and the researchers were surprised to see it in a mammal. They now hope to harness lessons learned from this rodent to design future therapies for people to prevent calamitous damage during heart attacks or strokes when oxygenated blood cannot reach the brain.
ADVERTISEMENT
Naked mole-rats, they found, can survive up to 18 minutes with no oxygen and at least five hours in low-oxygen conditions that would kill a person in minutes.
“Naked mole-rats have evolved in an extremely different environment from most other mammals and they have had millions of years to figure out how to survive dramatic oxygen deprivation,” said neurobiologist Thomas Park of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who led the study published in the journal Science .
In low-oxygen conditions, they enter a coma-like state and release fructose into the blood. By shifting their metabolism from the normal glucose-based system that relies on oxygen to a fructose-based system that does not, they can fuel vital organs such as the heart and brain.
ADVERTISEMENT