| Our inbred rat colony at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was derived from Long Evans Outbred rats originally purchased from Blue Spruce Farms, Altamont, NY in the Fall of 1982. In order to reduce individual differences, Principal Investigator Martha U. Gillette, Ph.D, initiated inbreeding (consecutive brother-sister matings). In March 1993, the colony reached generation #20, defined by the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research (ILAR) as the point during inbreeding at which the strain can officially be considered inbred.
The official name, as registered with the Rat Genome Database (RGD) for our inbred rat strain is
LE/BluGill.
The Clockworks Laboratory has been working with the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW), who is analyzing the phenotypic profile of our inbred rats. Their project, entitled
Physiogenomics of Stressors in Derived
Consomic Rats, is supported by the National Heart, Lung & Blood Institute (NHLBI) Programs for Genomic Applications. As part of the PhysGen analysis, our rats were genotyped in 2002. A dense genome scan was performed at a 10cM interval between markers on our LE/BluGill progenitors. The results of the scan showed the colony is inbred, yielding one allele at each locus tested. Data on
LE/BluGill Genotypes, derived from these physiological measures, is posted at the PhysGen web site.
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