Unlike most mammals, female naked mole rats develop new eggs throughout their entire lives – a finding that could lead to improvements in human infertility research
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“This animal is the opportunity to think about and develop new techniques or potential targets for making new drugs, because their [reproductive] cells have the same program that we have in mice and humans, but they’re behaving differently,” saysNative to East Africa, naked mole rats live for up to 37 years and form underground colonies with social structures similar to those of bees, including a single queen that produces offspring for her entire life.
In humans, mice and other mammals, oogenesis only occurs before birth and, in some species, shortly afterwards, leaving newborn females with a limited lifetime supply of eggs. Those eggs gradually die over time, leading to reduced fertility with age. In the naked mole rats, though, Brieño-Enríquez and his colleagues found large numbers of germ cells at every stage of life they tested, with numbers steadily increasing throughout the first week of life. At 8 days old, the naked mole rats had an average of 1.5 million egg cells – 95 times more than 8-day-old mice, says Brieño-Enríquez.
The researchers then grew ovary sections of young animals in their laboratories and observed ongoing oogenesis. Combined with the team’s
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