It was found last year that naked mole rats are impervious to the sting of acid. They took a closer look at the naked mole rats acid sensors in Berlin at a science lab and discovered that all of them are working perfectly fine, its just that inside these receptors a protein responsible for relaying the message about the acid’s presence to the nervous system. Researchers are looking into this discovery because it might lead get drugs that can target pain that is directly associated with inflammation. Mole rats live in large social groups in burrows underground, and in these confined conditions carbon dioxide levels ruse as high as 8 to 10 percent higher in the air and these levels are know to make body tissues acidic. So since they have to live here their bodies have developed a way of blocking out acidic pain so they could survive down there. They looked inside these cells and they found out the reason a mole rat can take the pain of acids is because although their cells feel the acid there is a special protein called a sodium channel that takes in the acid and blocks of the message it sends to the nervous system. When the researchers engineered human cells with the naked mole rats version of the sodium channel the cells responded in a similar way by blocking out the message of the presence of the acid. Researches are now trying to see if they could create a painkiller that makes these proteins so that people wont feel the pain of inflammation.
The discovery is very important because with this discovery of the naked mole rats ability to block acidic pain, we as people can create a pill that would make cells make this protein that way people will no longer have to suffer from chronic inflammation pain and be a huge step in medicine.
I think this article is very surprising because I could not believe that cells would be able to block out pain messages from being sent to the nervous system naturally. I also think its very interesting that researchers can actually modify cells so they naturally do things how other cells would, like how they were able to make human cells block acids like the mole rat cells.
Posted for S. Walsh
Does human can block acid pain??
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