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Fertility declines with property successful astir pistillate mammals, but bare mole rats tin make caller eggs arsenic adults, enabling them to stay fertile passim their lives
Life 21 February 2023A bare mole rat successful the lab UPMC
Unlike astir mammals, pistillate bare mole rats make caller eggs passim their full lives – a uncovering that could pb to improvements successful quality infertility research.
“This carnal is the accidental to deliberation astir and make caller techniques oregon imaginable targets for making caller drugs, due to the fact that their [reproductive] cells person the aforesaid programme that we person successful mice and humans – but they’re behaving differently,” says Miguel Angel Brieño-Enríquez astatine the University of Pittsburgh successful Pennsylvania.
Native to East Africa, bare mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) unrecorded up to 37 years and signifier underground colonies with societal structures akin to bees, including a azygous queen that produces offspring for her full life. By contrast, mice lone unrecorded astir 4 years, and their fertility starts dropping erstwhile they are lone 9 months old.
Curious astir these differences successful reproductive lifespans, Brieño-Enríquez and his colleagues looked astatine the ovaries of bare mole rats nether a microscope erstwhile the animals were 1, 5, 8, 15, 28, and 90 days old. They utilized precocious staining and investigating techniques to place the antithetic kinds of cells they saw. In particular, they were looking for germ cells that tin disagreement and mature into oocytes – oregon eggs – done a process known arsenic oogenesis.
In humans, mice and different mammals, oogenesis lone occurs earlier and, successful immoderate species, soon aft birth, leaving newborn females with a constricted beingness proviso of eggs. Those eggs gradually dice implicit time, starring to reduced fertility with age.
In the bare mole rats, though, Brieño-Enríquez and his colleagues recovered ample numbers of germ cells astatine each signifier of beingness they tested, with numbers steadily expanding passim the archetypal week of life. At 8 days old, the bare mole rats had an mean of 1.5 cardinal ovum cells – 95 times much than 8-day-old mice, helium says.
The researchers past grew ovary sections of young animals successful their laboratories and observed ongoing oogenesis. Combined with the team’s previous discovery of germ cells adjacent successful 10-year-old mole-rats, their observations suggest that bare mole rats tin continually replenish their ovum supply.
Because immoderate young pistillate mole rat tin go the colony’s adjacent queen, Brieño-Enríquez and his colleagues past tested the idiosyncratic females’ imaginable fertility by removing three-year-old females from their colonies and placing them successful idiosyncratic cages with a antheral for 4 weeks. The animals became fertile similar queens, helium says. Investigations nether the microscope showed that idiosyncratic females person germ cells successful their ovaries, but oogenesis lone begins erstwhile the idiosyncratic transitions to a queen.
The survey provides “very utile insight” which volition surely beryllium “a important publication to the field,” says Scott Sills astatine the Center for Advanced Genetics successful California. “If this could beryllium transformed into a objective exertion [for humans], past not lone would it person a precise meaningful relation successful infertility practice, but it would fundamentally reset the full paradigm for however we dainty menopause,” helium says. “Symptomatic menopause would nary longer beryllium hostage to replacement therapy.”
But however precisely that accusation tin construe into contributions to quality medicine remains to beryllium elucidated, says Aspasia Destouni astatine Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, successful Greece. “I spot this arsenic an breathtaking accidental to manipulate a caller exemplary organism that has much accessible samples [for quality reproduction research],” she says. “But we person to beryllium cautious astir the excitement level, due to the fact that radical mightiness deliberation that this is an reply to menopause… but clearly, they’re not determination yet.”
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