(Hypertension. 2001;38:e9.)
© 2001 American Heart Association, Inc.
Letters to the Editor |
Letters to the Editor
Mislabelling of Donryu Rats
Department of Physiology, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Department of Internal Medicine, TEPCO Hospital, Tokyo, Japan
To the Editor:
Between 1992 and 2000, 21 papers1–21were published that used rats from inbred colonies in Melbourne and Tokyo that were believed to be of the Donryu (DRY) strain. These rats were thought to have been the same strain as DRY used by Dr Tanase in early breeding experiments in relation to blood pressure in spontaneously hypertensive rats(SHR).22, 23The original DRY strain had been held at the Sankyo Co, Ltd, in Japan. At sometime before 1991, however, it appears that in the company’s laboratories there had been an unrecognised substitution of Fisher344 (F344) for DRY (see below) and that authentic DRY were culled and no longer exist.
In 1991, the company supplied 5 brother-sister breeding pairs to the Melbourne Biological Research Facility at the Austin Hospital. Accompanying documentation attributed specific genetic biochemical profiles of the DRY strain to these animals and differentiated them from the F344, BUF (Buffalo), and LEW (Lewis) strains. A separate colony was also established in Tokyo in the same manner.
The subsequent generations of these animals were used predominantly in cross-breeding studies of blood pressure, cardiac size, and intracellular calcium. These studies included genome-wide mapping in which the purported Dry strain from the Melbourne colony was genotyped for polymorphic markers. These data were subsequently made available on the Internet(www.genome.wi.mit.edu/rat/public/).
Recently, Dr Tanase indicated that the animals supplied to Melbourne and Tokyo that had been labeled as DRY were instead likely to be F344 rats. The company believed that before transfer to Melbourne and Tokyo, the labeling of