When deprived of oxygen, naked mole-rats have a unique ability to convert sugar to energy, a skill that might one day help treat victims of heart attack and stroke, researchers said on Thursday.
These cold-blooded mammals have long been a source of fascination for scientists because they can live 30 years, rarely get cancer and do not seem to feel most kinds of pain.
Researchers reported in the journal Science that when naked mole-rats are exposed to oxygen levels low enough to kill a person in minutes, they can survive for at least five hours.
Photo: Reuters
They do so by acting like plants, converting fructose to energy to keep their brain cells alive.
In the absence of oxygen, large amounts of fructose flowed into their bloodstreams and were carried to brain cells.
“The naked mole-rat has simply rearranged some basic building blocks of metabolism to make it super-tolerant to low-oxygen conditions,” said lead author Thomas Park, professor of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
The rodents go into a state of suspended animation, moving very little and lowering their pulse and breathing rate.
They use fructose to survive until oxygen is available again.
“The naked mole-rat is the only known mammal to use suspended animation to survive oxygen deprivation,” the study said.
There is a reason naked mole-rats have this unusual metabolism — it could be an adaptation to living in crowded burrows where oxygen is hard to find.
“The air can get very stuffy in these underground burrows,” said professor Gary Lewin, a coauthor and researcher at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association.
Their heart rate drops from 200 beats per minute to about 50.
Once oxygen becomes available again, they take a whiff and start stirring again, as if nothing ever happened, the report said.
If scientists could harness this process and apply it humans, it could aid the survival of people who are deprived of oxygen during cardiac crises like heart attacks or strokes.
“Our work is the first evidence that a mammal switches to fructose as a fuel,” Lewin said.
“Theoretically, very few changes might be needed to adopt this unusual metabolism,” he said.
However, it remains to be seen if human cells could be coaxed into behaving this way.
“Patients who suffer an infarction or stroke experience irreparable damage after just a few minutes of oxygen deprivation,” he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing