© Thomas Park/UICNaked Mole-Rats - they're plants, well, sort of.
. Understanding how the animals do this could lead to
treatments for patients suffering crises of oxygen deprivation, as in heart attacks and strokes."This is just the latest remarkable discovery about the
naked mole-rat -- a cold-blooded mammal that lives decades longer than other rodents, rarely gets cancer, and doesn't feel many types of pain," says Thomas Park, professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who led an international team of researchers from UIC, the Max Delbrück Institute in Berlin and the University of Pretoria in South Africa on the study.
In humans, laboratory mice, and all other known mammals,
when brain cells are starved of oxygen they run out of energy and begin to die. But naked mole-rats have a backup:
their brain cells start burning fructose, which produces energy anaerobically through a metabolic pathway that is only used by plants -- or so scientists thought.
In the new study, the researchers exposed naked mole-rats to low oxygen conditions in the laboratory and found that
they released large amounts of fructose into the bloodstream. The fructose, the scientists found, was
transported into brain cells by molecular fructose pumps that in all other mammals are found only on cells of the intestine. "The naked mole-rat has simply rearranged some basic building-blocks of metabolism to make it super-tolerant to low oxygen conditions," said Park, who has studied the strange species for 18 years.
