New Rat Center to Serve as Worldwide Resource

The RRRC will import, cryopreserve, produce, and distribute high-quality laboratory rats.
The center's inventory will include various inbred, hybrid, and genetically modified rats for use in biomedical research. These mutant rat strains will be provided to the RRRC by investigators who have derived them but lack the resources to cryopreserve and broadly distribute them. Currently, there are many more mutant strains than there is capacity to make them available in pathogen-free form to researchers. The RRRC will serve as a centralized source of information on the availability of specific rat lines and also as a source of the animals. Added services include genotyping, phenotyping, and testing for and eliminating pathogens.

The center was formed by researchers from the University of Missouri, the Indiana University School of Medicine, and Northwestern University Medical School with a US$6.7 million grant from the U.S. National Center for Research Resources (NCRR) and the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

"The mouse and rate genomes are currently being mapped and sequenced, and this activity is expected to facilitate derivation of even more mutant rats in the near future,” said Judith Vaitukaitis, M.D., director of the NCRR.