Immune Deficiency Syndrome in Rodents: The Nude Rat

The athymic nude mutation was first recorded in 1953 in a colony of outbred hooded rats maintained at the Rowett Research Institute, Bucksburn, Aberdeen, U.K., and the symbol rnu for Rowett nude has been assigned to the recessive mutant gene (1). We have introduced the nude mutant in our institute and backcrossed it into the WAG rat strain for 12 generations. Previous studies (1–3) suggest that the athymic nude rat is in many ways very similar to the nude mouse, but the numbers of animals and parameters investigated were limited. Therefore the morphologic characteristics in the nude rat were further defined (4). We here present a survey of our studies of these nude animals during the last 10 years.