A shaggy Siberian digger?

Russian answer to a naked digger
Underground rodents will help people get rid of death and old ageGrigory Tarasevich, "Russian Reporter" No. 20-2012

The fight against aging is one of the most popular topics in science. Theoretically, you can live, if not forever, then at least one and a half times longer than now. Some scientists believe that a person could borrow a recipe for eternal youth from those animals that somehow mysteriously manage not to age. The correspondent of the "Russian Reporter" visited the laboratory, where they study a rodent claiming to be a long-liver.

It is cold and gloomy in the basement of the Novosibirsk Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals: these are the conditions of the experiment. On the shelves are metal containers resembling pots.

They show me one of them. At the bottom there are sawdust, a hefty carrot and three dark gray swarming lumps, either fat mice or thin hamsters. One lump is swarming a little more actively than the other two. As I later learned, this swarming is extremely important for world science.

The experiment conducted by biologists should at least be interesting to animal lovers. And as a maximum, he can change the ideas about life and death.

In search of eternal lifeWe are mortal.

At first glance, this seems obvious: all objects of the material world, from the iPhone to the Solar System, will someday become unusable. But life differs from everything else in that each of its cells contains detailed instructions for the repair and reproduction of the whole organism. Genes can be copied almost indefinitely, thanks to which tissues are constantly being updated. The classic metaphor of "the genome as a book" suggests that a volume of Homer may fall apart from old age. But the "Odyssey" itself will not disappear so easily. Its text will be reprinted again and again in different publishing houses.

Theoretically, we could live forever. But from the point of view of evolution, old age and death are very useful. A living being must mate, give offspring and at first support this offspring. His genome has found a safe haven, which means that it is not necessary to live on – only resources are wasted. Without aging, disease and death, evolution would have been much slower, and it is not a fact that it would have advanced further than sponges and annelids.

Now more and more scientists are inclined to believe that the self-destruction program is written somewhere in our genes. If there is such a program, then it can be found and disabled. There are many places to search. For example, Russian academician Vladimir Skulachev from Moscow State University is now focusing on the so-called free radical concept. The phrase "free radicals" has nothing to do with politics. We are talking about reactive oxygen species that oxidize DNA, proteins and lipids, which eventually leads to aging and death.

Many people are trying to fight free radicals. Skulachev and his group chose mitochondria as a target (as they are called in biology textbooks – "energy stations of the cell"). A substance called SkQ1 – "Skulachev ions" was synthesized, and a method for its delivery to the mitochondria was invented. By the way, some of the technology was borrowed from plants: they also have to resist aggressive oxygen.

Experiments have shown that "Skulachev ions" can work. Immortality, of course, does not come, but eye diseases can be treated. And from day to day, Visomitin eye drops should appear in Russian pharmacies, in some sense being a harbinger of the elixir of eternal youth.

But neither Skulachev nor other biologists are going to stop at any one method: scientists work with stem cells, hormones, and artificial organs are grown. It is possible that the recipe can be suggested by animals that evolution has taught to live a long time and get sick a little.

Wrinkled, hairless, toothyYou sit at some scientific conference, listen to the report of another scientist and slowly begin to fall asleep to the mantra "reactivation of telomerase... activity of antioxidant systems... decrease in the status of caveolin... non-enzymatic reactions...".

And suddenly an unexpected phrase "naked digger" pops out of this string of terms. You wake up right away.

A naked digger. The first association is not very appetizing: a man with no clothes at all, hairy, sweaty and smeared with clay. And even with a shovel. In fact, the naked digger is an African rodent found in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.

He's not handsome either. Imagine an obscenely fat rat with wrinkled pink-gray skin instead of fur. The muzzle is decorated with something like a pig's snout, under which two huge teeth stick out. They say that with these teeth a naked digger can even gnaw through concrete.

But in recent years, biologists all over the world have fallen in love with this creature with terrible force. It is studied in hundreds of laboratories, scientific articles are written about it, its genome has been deciphered urgently. The naked digger has become something of a Holy Grail for scientists.

His descriptions consist of solid "unique" and "unique". For example, he is naked because he has no fur on him. There is practically no such thing among rodents. But this is so, an aesthetic trifle. More interestingly, the naked digger is almost the only mammal that belongs to the category of eusocial. This means that the naked digger community is organized in much the same way as bees and ants. At the head is a hefty female queen. Only she is allowed to have sex with selected males and give birth to children.

And a naked digger is able to survive with a minimum amount of oxygen, is not afraid of acid burns and so on. But the biggest excitement in the world of science is the fact that a naked digger does not age.

In a photo published by Cornell University, twenty-two-year-old student Dara Neuman gently looks at a naked digger lying in her palm. The uniqueness of the situation is that the animal is several years older than the girl.

It is believed that the life span of a mammal is proportional to its mass. A naked digger weighs about 30 grams. A mouse with this weight lives for a maximum of three years, and then if it is fed delicious and healthy food. And an underground rodent can reach the age of thirty. It's as if a person lived to be 500-800 years old. At the same time, with age, the naked digger does not change either the state of the tissues or the cardiovascular system. In fact, he dies young.

– This is a mystery that many scientists are struggling with, – admits Maxim Skulachev, the son of an academician and one of the leaders of the anti-aging project. – But so far no one has clearly said what the secret of the naked digger is.

There are only versions. For example, his cells seem to be able to resist oxidative stress (that is, evolution has done with a naked digger what Academician Skulachev wants to do with all of us).

But the most important thing is that no naked digger has been found yet who would have cancer. Our compatriots Vera Gorbunova and Andrey Seluanov, who work at the American University of Rochester, found out how they manage to do this not so long ago. In any organism, healthy cells behave politely and try not to push each other. This courtesy is called contact inhibition – as soon as two cells are too close to each other, the concentration of a certain protein increases in them, which stops further growth. But cancer cells do not pay attention to this protein and continue to take over the body. In a naked digger, contact braking is more complicated: additional proteins are involved there. If one brake does not work, the other one turns on.

In general, the naked digger has something to share with biologists. Therefore, it is studied both in the USA and in European countries. But such studies are not conducted in Russia.

– This is a complete disgrace! There is not a single naked digger in any Russian laboratory! Maxim Skulachev laments.

Of course, now scientists can already afford to buy several copies of the animal, since firms specializing in the supply of naked diggers to scientific laboratories have appeared in Africa. But there is a hypothesis that an animal with similar qualities lives on the territory of Russia.

Cling to youth with your teethThe center of Novosibirsk.

A huge monument to the polar bear marks the entrance to the zoo. I am met by two young biologists: Ivan and Ekaterina.

– Come on, we'll show you our insectarium now…

As far as I remember, an insectarium is a place where insects are bred. There are all sorts of butterflies, beetles. We walk along the alley along the zoo. We get to a one-story house belonging to the Institute of Systematics and Ecology of Animals SB RAS. In addition to insects (I did not understand whether they are there or not), an animal is kept here, which can become a Russian alternative to a naked digger.

This is a blindfold (in Latin – Ellobius talpinus). The name evokes much nicer associations than in the case of its African counterpart. And it looks nicer: instead of dirty pink folds, soft dark gray fur. However, when an employee of the laboratory takes out a blindfold from a metal container, two long teeth sticking out in front of the lips become visible.

Like the naked digger, it is an underground rodent that digs tunnels and eats plant roots. This is where the similarity ends. The common sleeper is a close relative of the hamster and the field mouse, and the naked digger is on its own.

– We catch them literally in the vicinity of Novosibirsk, – Evgeny Novikov, a leading researcher at the laboratory of physiological adaptations of vertebrates, explains to me. – We are going fifty kilometers to the south – there is the northern border of their distribution. In general, this animal is steppe, its range is Kazakhstan, the Volga region, Ukraine. It reaches us at the very edge.

As with the naked digger, there are a lot of unclear things with the blind man. For example, it is not completely clear how the division into males and females occurs. Normal animals, including humans, have two sex chromosomes: X and Y. Caught X and Y – you become a man, got X and X – a woman. And in the common sleeper, both males and females have X and X. Now scientists are trying to understand exactly where the gender is "registered".

Another mystery is whether this creature falls into hibernation or not. Biologists have been arguing about this for a long time. And then they constructed a miniature thermometer from improvised means, which was implanted in rodents. I immediately remember a left-handed man who shod a flea, because such a device should weigh one and a half grams and at the same time store thousands of temperature measurements.

Measurements have shown that the slepushonka does not fall into full hibernation. It seems that it can be in some kind of intermediate state, when the body temperature sometimes drops, but not much - up to 30-32 degrees (for comparison: an earth squirrel in hibernation can cool down to -2 degrees). But scientists are not completely sure about this – perhaps the blindfolds have a kind of division of labor: some individuals sleep in winter, and some warm their burrow with their bodies, resulting in such an average temperature.

But the most important thing is, of course, aging. More precisely, its absence.

– Old age is defined as an age–related deterioration of the body leading to death ... - Evgeny Novikov begins from afar. – We do not see such an age-related deterioration of the condition. We measure all their indicators: activity, mobility, muscle strength – they practically do not change. We also do not see a decrease in energy exchange, that is, blind girls remain young in all respects.

That active dark gray lump, which I wrote about at the beginning of the article, is a venerable father of the family, who is already in his sixth year, which is a lot for a rodent of this size. Two neighbors in the pot are his sons. There is no external difference – dad looks even more cheerful. This contradicts all observations of mammals, in which the signs of old age appear quite clearly.

In addition, small animals after the birth of children, in theory, should age faster. They have done their job – they have passed the genome to descendants, and it is not profitable for evolution to tolerate them further in the world. Novikov even used the offensive expression "disposable males" several times in a conversation with me. And this blind-daddy at least henna. He nibbles his carrot and cheerfully rummages among the sawdust. It turns out that he somehow manages to overcome age.

Here you could write: "Sensation! A beast that does not age has been discovered in Russia!! The journalist of the "Russian Reporter" was the first to observe this experiment!!!" But scientists are more delicate people:

– There is a scientific ethics. The data that the blind does not age are unofficial," explains Evgeny Novikov. – Until they have been carefully statistically processed, until they are sent to a peer-reviewed journal, we have no moral right to make such statements.

Maxim Skulachev, whom I called after returning to Moscow, is equally cautious.:

– This is confirmed to the accuracy of several animals…

It is not completely clear how long a blindfold caught in nature can live. She does not name her age, and the conditions in Siberia are very harsh, which clearly affects life expectancy.

Several dozens of blind mice grown in Novosibirsk were transported to the laboratory of Moscow State University. While they are being watched.

– We feed carrots with beer, check for cancer... – explains Skulachev Jr.

– Why do the blind girls need beer?

– Well, there are vitamins that rodents need.

– What about cancer?

– It doesn't seem to have been detected yet. We assume that the blind girl has her own means of combating malignant tumors. And now we want to combine this quality with the prevention of oxidative stress through our SkQ1.

If the experiment succeeds, the animal will be able to live for a very long time. And someday all this biochemical construction will be able to transfer to a person. It takes a lot of time to do this. But even the purely theoretical possibility of victory over old age still warms the soul

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru24.05.2012