cancer fighter. The naked mole rat is not much to look at, but it has an effective way to fight against cancer.
Trisha M. Shears
With his wrinkled skin and Bucked teeth, the naked mole-rat is not going to win a beauty contest. But the burrowing, desert rodent is exceptional in another way: It does not get cancer. The naked mole rat cells hate being crowded, it is, so they stop growing before they can form tumors. The details could one day lead to a new strategy for treating cancer in people.
rodentsA search of clues on aging, cell biologists Vera Gorbunova, Andrei Seluanov, and colleagues at the University of Rochester have been comparing that vary in size and duration of life, mouse beaver. The naked mole-rat is distinguished because it is small but can live more than 28 years - seven times longer than the house mouse. cancer resistance might be an important factor; while most laboratory mice and rats die from the disease, he was never seen in naked mole rats.
team looked Gorbunova mole rat cells for an answer. normal human and mouse cells will grow and divide in a Petri dish until they mash closely against each other in a single dense layer -. "contact inhibition" a mechanism known as naked mole rat cells are more sensitive to their neighbors, the researchers found. The cells stop growing when they touch. The strategy helps keep rodents probably without cancer, as contact inhibition fails in cancer cells, causing them to accumulate.
The reason, the researchers found, is that the naked mole rat cells rely on two proteins-- named p27 Kip1 and p16 Ink4a - stops cell growth when they touch, while the human and mouse cells rely mainly on p27 Kip1 . "They use an additional point of control," said Gorbunova, whose study appears online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ( PNAS ). When the team mutated rat cells naked mole so that they grew much closer together than before, the levels of p16 Ink4a dropped.
the type of prevention cancer naked mole rat may be relevant to humans because the same genes are involved, says Brown University biologist John Sedivy cancer. rat defenses "have evolved separately, but use the same nuts and bolts," dit- it. Sedivy writes in an accompanying commentary in PNAS it may be possible to "change the entire network [of tumor-suppressing pathways] to develop new prevention strategies."
the next step, Gorbunova says, is to find other proteins and molecules that make up this new way of contact inhibition. One obstacle is that little is known about the genes of the naked mole rat. The creature has been proposed for genome sequencing but so far has been turned down. "I hope Vera's study will put the naked mole rate higher in the queue," said George Martin, a researcher who studies aging and professor emeritus at the University of Washington.
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