Laboratory rats or lab rats are strains of the subspecies Rattus norvegicus domestica which are bred and kept for scientific research. While less commonly used for research than laboratory mice, rats have served as an important animal model for research in psychology and biomedical science.
Origins
In 18th-century Europe, wild brown rats (Rattus norvegicus) ran rampant and this infestation fueled the industry of rat-catching. Rat-catchers would not only make money by trapping the rodents, but also by selling them for food or, more commonly, for rat-baiting.
Rat-baiting was a popular sport, which involved filling a pit with rats and timing how long it took for a terrier to kill them all. Over time, breeding the rats for these contests may have produced variations in color, notably the albino and hooded varieties. The first time one of these albino mutants was brought into a laboratory for a study was in 1828 for an experiment on fasting. Over the next 30 years, rats were used for several more experiments and eventually the laboratory rat became the first animal domesticated for purely scientific reasons.
In Japan, there was a widespread practice of keeping rats as a domesticated pet during the Edo period and in the 18th century guidebooks on keeping domestic rats were published by Youso Tamanokakehashi (1775) and Chingan Sodategusa (1787). Genetic analysis of 117 albino rat strains collected from all parts of the world carried out by a team led by Takashi Kuramoto at Kyoto University in 2012 showed that the albinos descended from hooded rats and all the albinos descended from a single ancestor. As there is evidence that the hooded rat was known as the "Japanese rat" in the early 20th century, Kuramoto concluded that one or more Japanese hooded rats might have been brought to Europe or the Americas and an albino rat that emerged as a product of the breeding of these hooded rats was the common ancestor of all the albino laboratory rats in use today.
Use in research
The rat found early use in laboratory research in five areas: W. S. Small suggested that the rate of learning could be measured by rats in a maze; a suggestion employed by John B. Watson for his Ph.D. dissertation in 1903. The first rat colony in America used for nutrition research was started in January 1908 by Elmer McCollum and then, nutritive requirements of rats were used by Thomas Burr Osborne and Lafayette Mendel to determine the details of protein nutrition. The reproductive function of rats was studied at the Institute for Experimental Biology at the University of California, Berkeley by Herbert McLean Evans and Joseph A. Long. The genetics of rats was studied by William Ernest Castle at the Bussey Institute of Harvard University until it closed in 1994. Rats have long been used in cancer research; for instance at the Crocker Institute for Cancer Research.
The historical importance of this species to scientific research is reflected by the amount of literature on it: roughly 50% more than that on laboratory mice. Laboratory rats are frequently subject to dissection or microdialysis to study internal effects on organs and the brain, such as for cancer or pharmacological research. Laboratory rats not sacrificed may be euthanized or, in some cases, become pets.
Domestic rats differ from wild rats (various spp. of Rodentia) in many ways: they are calmer and significantly less likely to bite, they can tolerate greater crowding, they breed earlier and produce more offspring, and their brains, livers, kidneys, adrenal glands, and hearts are smaller.
Scientists have bred many strains or "lines" of rats specifically for experimentation. Most are derived from the albino Wistar rat, which is still widely used. Other common strains are the Sprague Dawley, Fischer 344, Holtzman albino strains, Long–Evans, and Lister black hooded rats. Inbred strains are also available, but are not as commonly used as inbred mice.
Much of the genome of Rattus norvegicus has been sequenced. In October 2003, researchers succeeded in cloning two laboratory rats by nuclear transfer. This was the first in a series of developments that have begun to make rats tractable as genetic research subjects, although they still lag behind mice, which lend themselves better to the embryonic stem cell techniques typically used for genetic manipulation. Many investigators who wish to trace observations on behavior and physiology to underlying genes regard aspects of these in rats as more relevant to humans and easier to observe than in mice, giving impetus to the development of genetic research techniques applicable to rats.