Tzuhua D Lin, Nimrod D Rubinstein, Nicole L Fong, Megan Smith, Wendy Craft, Baby Martin-McNulty, Rebecca Perry, Martha A Delaney, Margaret A Roy, Rochelle Buffenstein
Naked mole-rats (NMRs) are best known for their extreme longevity and cancer resistance, suggesting that their immune system might have evolved to facilitate these phenotypes. Natural killer (NK) and T cells have evolved to detect and destroy cells infected with pathogens and to provide an early response to malignancies. While it is known that NMRs lack NK cells, likely lost during evolution, little is known about their T-cell subsets in terms of the evolution of the genes that regulate their function, their clonotypic diversity, and the thymus where they mature...
April 11, 2024: Nature Communications