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  • [Squeaks]

  • [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 theyve

  • 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 youve 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.

[Music]

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