... to find new and effective intervention targets. Here, myocardium-specific Trim44 knockout rats were generated using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Cardiac phenotypic observations revealed that Trim44 knockout affected cardiac morphology at baseline. Rats with Trim44 deficiency exhibited resistance to cardiac...

.... This has increased the need for basic research efforts into animal models for DMD. Here, we characterized in detail the cardiovascular abnormalities of Dmd mdx rats, with the aim of determining the suitability of this recently established dystrophin-deficient small animal as a model for DMD. Various...

... maintained. The Mouse Genome Database (MGD, http://www.informatics.jax.org), Rat Genome Database (RGD, http://rgd.mcw.edu) and Disease Ontology (DO, http://www.disease-ontology.org) projects are collaborating to augment DO, aligning and incorporating disease terms used by MGD and RGD, and improving DO...

...Philip M. Coan; Oliver Hummel; Ana Garcia Diaz; Marjorie Barrier; Neza Alfazema; Penny J. Norsworthy; Michal Pravenec; Enrico Petretto; Norbert Hübner; Timothy J. Aitman ABSTRACT We previously mapped hypertension-related insulin resistance quantitative trait loci (QTLs) to rat chromosomes 4, 12...

...Linda J. Mullins; Bryan R. Conway; Robert I. Menzies; Laura Denby; John J. Mullins ABSTRACT The rat has classically been the species of choice for pharmacological studies and disease modeling, providing a source of high-quality physiological data on cardiovascular and renal pathophysiology over...

..., the fundamental understanding of the biology of HEV replication is limited and there are few therapeutic options. The development of such therapies is partially hindered by the lack of a robust and convenient animal model. We propose the infection of athymic nude rats with the rat HEV strain LA-B350...

...Jacob Kjell; Lars Olson ABSTRACT A long-standing goal of spinal cord injury research is to develop effective spinal cord repair strategies for the clinic. Rat models of spinal cord injury provide an important mammalian model in which to evaluate treatment strategies and to understand...

... individuals to a variety of early-onset cancers. Development of appropriate translational animal models that carry mutations in Tp53 and recapitulate human disease are important for drug discovery, biomarker development and disease modeling. Current Tp53 mouse and rat models have significant phenotypic...

... compared to rats. This shift was primarily instigated by the availability of a much larger genetic toolbox for mice, particularly embryonic-stem-cell-based targeting technology for gene disruption. With the recent emergence of tools for altering the rat genome, notably genome-editing technologies...

...Tim Aitman; Paraminder Dhillon; Aron M. Geurts ABSTRACT Future prospects continue to be strong for research using the rat as a model organism. New technology has enabled the proliferation of many new transgenic and knockout rat strains, the genomes of more than 40 rat strains have been sequenced...

... into a more comprehensive study design, called systems genetics, which aims to unravel the complex biological networks and pathways involved in disease, and in turn map their genetic control points. The first fully integrated systems genetics study was carried out in rats, and the results, which revealed...

...Ana Isabel Garcia Diaz; Ben Moyon; Philip M. Coan; Neza Alfazema; Lara Venda; Kevin Woollard; Tim Aitman ABSTRACT The Wistar Kyoto (WKY) rat and the spontaneously hypertensive (SHR) rat inbred strains are well-established models for human crescentic glomerulonephritis (CRGN) and metabolic syndrome...