The cancer-resistant rat

SMALL PRINT:The naked mole rat may not be the prettiest creature in the world, but then again sometimes beauty is only skin deep

The underground-dwelling rodent species Heterocephalus glaberhas been catching the eye of scientists for its other attributes: it is exceptionally long-lived and appears to be resistant to cancer, so it could be a promising biomedical model.

And now its genome has been sequenced, according to an international research consortium, which has announced the “first draft” milestone.

“The naked mole rat has fascinated scientists for many years, but it wasn’t until a few years ago that we discovered that it could live for such a long period of time,” says Dr Joao Pedro Magalhaes of the University of Liverpool’s Institute of Integrative Biology.

“It is not much bigger than a mouse, which normally lives up to four years, and yet this particular underground rodent lives for three decades in good health . . . We aim to use the naked-mole-rat genome to understand the level of resistance it has to disease, particularly cancer, as this might give us more clues as to why some animals and humans are more prone to disease than others. With this work, we want to establish the naked mole rat as the first model of resistance to chronic diseases of ageing.”

You can find out more at naked- mole-rat.org.