Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Vera Gorbunova] I'm Vera Gobunova and I'm a professor of biology and oncology at the
University of Rochester. [Andrei Seluanov] And I'm Andrei Seluanov. I'm an assistant
professor of biology. [Vera] And this is the naked mole rat. It was named "Vertebrate
of the Year" by Science Magazine. And while of course this is a stuffed animal, the real
naked mole rat is a lot smaller and is much harder to catch. Some people think these animals
are ugly, but once you see them actually moving, you can see that they are very cute and there
is inner beauty in these animals. [Andrei] The naked mole rat is really an amazing animal
because they are very long-lived. The maximum life span is 32 years. And on top of that
the naked mole rats never get cancer. They are very cancer resistant animals.
[Vera] So the reason naked mole rats were named "Vertebrate of the Year" is because of the two studies
performed in our laboratory. The first study identified the chemical named Hyaluronan in
naked mole rat tissues that makes naked mole rats resistant to cancer. [Andrei] And of
course the big question for us was, why these animals live so long. So what we found actually
was that the ribosomes of naked mole rats are very accurate machinery. It means that
they are able to synthesize protein with much higher accuracy compared to mouse ribosomes.
And that's a potential mechanism for longevity of naked mole rats. So the next step in our
research is to take those mechanisms we discovered in naked mole rats and then move them in to
mice to see if the mice will live longer and will be resistant to cancer. So this will
be a proof of principle that these mechanisms that we discovered in the naked mole rats
can be moved to a different species and can ultimately benefit humans. [Andrea] And we
have been working with naked mole rats for many years and we are really proud that Science
Magazine called naked mole rats the "Vertebrate of the Year".