Naked mole rat genome may point way to long, healthy life

The Washington Post

By David Brown

The upside is you live a ridiculously long and healthy life, can’t develop cancer, feel very little pain, never get lonely and have great skin right to the end.
The downside is you breathe stinky air, rarely go outside, tend to get cold, don’t see well, live in a monarchy and can’t count on having sex. (Also, you’re a naked mole rat.)

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(Eric Gay/AP) - Professor Rochelle Buffenstein holds a naked mole rat at the Barshop Institute at the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio.

How this collection of traits and behaviors came to exist in a strange rodent found only in the Horn of Africa has been a mystery. Now biologists have a tool for unraveling it — and what they find may one day prove useful to human medicine.

A team of 36 scientists working on three continents published the genome Wednesday of the naked mole rat, the latest and perhaps most exotic organism to have its entire DNA sequence transcribed.

“It’s a treasure-trove for cancer and Alzheimer’s research. It’s got so much information that we can now go and mine to test all kinds of theories about aging and disease,” said Rochelle Buffenstein, a researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio who participated in the project.

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