Rats, ever extraordinary!
Deprived of oxygen, naked mole-rats can survive by metabolizing fructose just as plants do, researchers report this week in the journal Science.
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.
The Harvard Law of Biology strikes again!
Just amazing -- any Martian dna in there?
busterggi, I wouldn’t rule it out, they are amazing beings! Of course, I’m biased, definitely on Team Rat. :D
I will say that I was annoyed at my crews, seeing those gorgeous little mole rats hauling green beans all over -- mine won’t touch them.
This is very interesting*. So the chemistry of fermenting fructose must be in some way easier than fermenting glucose. Both contain equal proportions of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen and nothing else, so there has to be something in the structure of fructose that facilitates anaerobic processes.
__
* = and naked mole rats seem like very interesting creatures.