Someone once called me "cute as a mole-rat," and I thanked them for the complement. Then I found out what mole-rats looked like, and I cried in the shower for a few days.
But I shouldn't have been so hasty to dismiss my homely likeness: The African naked mole-rat is immune to certain types of pain.They respond to mechanical pain like pinching, but don't respond to pain caused by capsaicin (the hot element in chili peppers), hot objects, and even burns from acid.
Thomas Park of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Gary Lewin at the Max-Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, Germany, and their colleagues discovered that mole-rats lack substance P, a compound that transmits information relating to chronic pain in between nerve cells. The team hopes to apply this discovery in gene therapy to help humans who suffer from chronic pain.
“Instead of going to the pain region of the spinal cord as we would expect, the nerves that lead from acid and capsaicin sensors go to the touch region,” says Park. “And their nerve fibres do not respond to acid at all.”
Did you hear that? At all.
When researchers used a herpes virus that makes cells manufacture substance P on the rats, they could feel unpleasantness from capsaicin, but they still couldn't feel the effects of acid. This suggests that they are immune to acidic pain because of another mechanism.
This might be an adaptation the mole-rats arrived at because of their subterranean home, says Park. “We know that the carbon dioxide levels in mole-rat tunnels are about 2%, and believe those levels could reach 10% in the group areas.” At such concentrations, carbon dioxide would form carbonic acid on the damp membranes of the respiratory system.
Sufferers of rheumatoid arthritis have slightly acidic joints, which might give us a clue as to how we could employ mole-rat acid resistance in arthritis sufferers.
So being like a mole-rat isn't so bad — maybe I'm immune to acid, too! There's only one way to find out!
[pours sulfuric acid on hand]
YEAAAAGH!!
Naked mole-rats don't feel the burn (Nature)
Image Credit: Nature
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