Paper, High-ranking naked mole-rats are more resilient

Naked mole-rats not only look strange, they have a strange lifestyle, too: they spend their entire lives underground. They also feel very little pain, rarely develop cancer and are exceptionally long-lived for a rodent — living up to 37 years. All this makes the hairless burrow-dwellers prime candidates for scientific study.

For nearly 20 years, Professor Gary Lewin at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) has been researching these extraordinary animals. “The naked mole rats live in strictly organized colonies,” Lewin says. “Each animal knows its rank and the tasks it has to perform.” Now Lewin’s team in the Molecular Physiology of Somatic Sensation Lab, together with scientists at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Pretoria, has made a new discovery: The researchers report in Open Biology that naked mole-rats of higher social rank have a larger spleen. The organ plays a key role in the immune system and is involved in the formation, maturation and retention of immune cells. “This could mean that higher-ranking animals have better built-in defenses than animals below them on the social hierarchy,” says lead author Dr. Valérie Bégay of Lewin’s team.

Learn more (opens external site)