Not just a cousin of the naked mole-rat: Damaraland mole-rats offer unique insights into biomedicine

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 molerat (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.