Nine Square Therapeutics, South San Francisco, CA 94080, United States of America.
Department of Biological Sciences, The University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, United States of America.
Comp Biochem Physiol B Biochem Mol Biol. 2022 Oct-Dec;262:110772. doi: 10.1016/j.cbpb.2022.110772. Epub 2022 Jun 13.
Evolutionary medicine has been a fast-growing field of biological research in the past decade. One of the strengths of evolutionary medicine is to use non-traditional model organisms which often exhibit unusual characteristics shaped by natural selection. Studying these unusual traits could provide valuable insight to understand biomedical questions, since natural selection likely discovers solutions to those complex biological problems. Because of many unusual traits, the naked mole-rat (NMR) has attracted attention from different research areas such as aging, cancer, and hypoxia- and hypercapnia-related disorders. However, such uniqueness of NMR physiology may sometimes make the translational study to human research difficult. Damaraland mole-rat (DMR) shares multiple characteristics in common with NMR, but shows higher degree of similarity with human in some aspects of their physiology. Research on DMR could therefore offer alternative insights and might bridge the gap between experimental findings from NMR to human biomedical research. In this review, we discuss studies of DMR as an extension of the current set of model organisms to help better understand different aspects of human biology and disease. We hope to encourage researchers to consider studying DMR together with NMR. By studying these two similar but evolutionarily distinct species, we can harvest the power of convergent evolution and avoid the potential biased conclusions based on life-history of a single species.
进化医学是过去十年中生物研究领域发展迅速的一个分支。进化医学的一个优势是使用非传统的模式生物，这些生物通常具有由自然选择塑造的不寻常特征。研究这些不寻常的特征可以为理解生物医学问题提供有价值的见解，因为自然选择可能会发现解决这些复杂生物学问题的方法。由于许多不寻常的特征，裸鼹鼠（NMR）引起了不同研究领域的关注，如衰老、癌症以及缺氧和高碳酸血症相关疾病。然而，NMR 生理学的这种独特性有时可能会使向人类研究的转化研究变得困难。多山沙漠地鼠（DMR）与 NMR 有许多共同特征，但在某些生理方面与人类的相似度更高。因此，对 DMR 的研究可以提供替代的见解，并可能弥合从 NMR 到人类生物医学研究的实验发现之间的差距。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了将 DMR 作为当前模型生物组的扩展来帮助更好地理解人类生物学和疾病的不同方面的研究。我们希望鼓励研究人员考虑将 DMR 与 NMR 一起研究。通过研究这两个相似但进化上不同的物种，我们可以利用趋同进化的力量，避免基于单个物种生活史的潜在有偏见的结论。
