Genetic Monitoring of Laboratory Rodents

This chapter reviews the problems associated with the maintenance of standardized strains of laboratory rodents and highlights the need to control their genetic quality and health status regularly. Some of the problems are related to the ethical aspects of experimenting with live animals, and others are related to the cost of the experiments or the types of facilities required to perform these experiments. A way to alleviate these problems is to design experiments in a way such that they yield the largest possible amount of novel and reliable information. To reach this goal, experiments should be performed with carefully designed protocols and genetically defined animals. For monitoring the genetic quality of inbred strains, a variety of techniques are described. All these techniques are based on the postulates that each inbred strain is a priori expected to be homozygous at all loci of its genome and that all animals of the same strain have exactly the same genetic make-up. They are designed following the progress of genetic tools available for the species, consisted in the analysis of a few traits, controlled by a set of specific alleles, and defining a specific pattern for each strain. Currently, most of the genetic monitoring techniques applied to inbred strains are based on DNA analysis and are extremely powerful.