BioProject

Arvicanthis Niloticus, commonly known as the Nile rat or African grass rat, is a valuable model organism used in various areas of research including behavioral neuroscience, nutrition science, ophthalmology and evolutionary biology. More...

Arvicanthis Niloticus, commonly known as the Nile rat or African grass rat, is a valuable model organism used in various areas of research including behavioral neuroscience, nutrition science, ophthalmology and evolutionary biology. Native to Northern Africa, this diurnal rodent has a diet primarily of leaves and stems, supplemented with insects, seeds, and fruits. However, when maintained in a laboratory environment with a rodent chow diet that has high caloric content relative to its native diet, both sexes rapidly develop diet-induced diabetes. By mimicking the disease etiology, the Nile rat provides an important animal model to study the causality of type 2 diabetes and is a suitable pre-clinical model. These samples were collected from a male and his parents in a laboratory colony of Huishi Toh and James Thomson at University of California, Santa Barbara, and used to generate chromosomal level reference assembly as part of the G10K-VGP project. Less...