Once again the naked mole rat has dealt an exciting blow to scientists. A new study suggests that naked mole rat abnormalities in mammalian reproduction may hold the key to maintaining human fertility.
These virtually blind, underground rodents are impervious to cancer, resistant to pain, show few signs of age-related decline, and are energy efficient, much like plants do in low-oxygen environments. We are already ignoring many biological criteria by being able to transform . Now, a new study reveals how female rodents that live over 30 years can continue to give birth in later life.
“Naked mole rats are the strangest animals,” says lead author Miguel Brienho Henriquez, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Magee Institute for Women and an assistant professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “They live the longest of any rodent, rarely get cancer, don’t feel pain like other mammals, live in underground colonies, and only the queen can give birth to babies. But the most amazing thing to me is that they never stop having babies.
The team compared naked mole rat ovaries to mouse ovaries at different stages of development. Fertility declined from about 9 months in mice, with a lifespan of about 4 years, whereas their similarly sized rodent counterparts did not. Most female mammals, including humans and mice, are born with a limited number of egg cells that deplete over time, increasingly hindering fertility. However, mole rats seem to have special biological processes that preserve these cells and maintain fertility throughout life.
In this study, the researchers also removed non-breeding 3-year-old females from the colony to stimulate breeding. They soon discovered that these females had egg progenitor cells that had begun to divide in preparation for becoming queens and breeding mober rats. Unlike humans and other mammals, this process of oogenesis occurs postnatally in naked mole rats, where egg precursor cells divide to form egg cells in both the 3-month-old and her 10-year-old animals.
“This is important because if we can understand how they can do this, we may be able to develop new drug targets or technologies that help human health.” Menopause occurs at the same age.”
In humans, oogenesis occurs at the embryonic stage of development, so the number of egg cells is limited at birth. The 1 to 2 million egg cells decrease to 300,000 to 500,000 by puberty and then to menopause. Some are lost through ovulation, but most die. Elucidating how mole rats store and produce more egg cells has the potential to open up new avenues for human reproductive therapy.
“We hope to use what we have learned from naked mole rats to protect future ovarian function and prolong fertility,” says Brienho-Henriquez.
This research naked communications.
Source: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
