WOKA and WOKW

Inbr. (1998) F35+

Colour: Albino

Genet. c

Origin: Outbred Wistar BB rats from Biobreeding Laboratories, Ottawa, Canada in 1981 to Dr. I. Kloting, Dept. of Laboratory Animal Science, Inst. of Pathology, University of Greifswald, D-17495, Karlsburg, Germany. WOKA (originally designated WOK.1A) was developed by brother x sister mating from rats homozygous for RT1^a, and WOKW (originally designated WOK.1W) from rats homozygous for RT1^U , a haplotype which pre-disposes to type I diabetes.

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Characteristics

No diabetes is observed in either strain. However, WOKW is hypertriglycemic, hyperinsulinemic and hypertensive with impaired glucose tolerance which increases with age, but it is normoglycemic and is not obese. It has a poor reproductive performance. It may be a good animal model of human insulin resistance (Kovacs et al, 1997). Both strains have been characterised at a number of genetic marker loci, and differed from each other at 6/30 loci (Bender et al, 1994). They have also been compared with three other BB substrains using 36 markers, and differ substantially both from the other strains and from each other (Kloting et al, 1995). \par

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Bender K., Balogh P., Bertrand M. F., den Bieman M., von Deimling O., Eghtessadi S., Gutman G. A., Hedrich H. J., Hunt S. V., Kluge R., Matsumoto K., Moralejo D. H., Nagel N., Portal A., Prokop C.-M., Siebert R. T., and van Zutphen L. F. M. (1994) Genetic characterization of inbred strains of the rat (Rattus norvegicus). J. Exp. Anim. Sci. 36, 151-165. \par

Kloting I., Voigt B., and Vogt L. (1995) Molecular analysis of diabetes-prone BB rat sublines and derivatives of their common ancestor as a tool to search for candidate loci causing different phenotypes in BB rats. Diabet. Res. 29, 65-71. \par

Kovacs P., Voigt B., Berg S., Vogt L., and Kloting I. (1997) WOK.1W rats: A potential animal model of the insulin resistance syndrome. Ann. NY Acad. Sci. 827, 94-100. \par

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INBRED STRAINS OF RATS
Updated 9 Apr. 1998
Michael FW Festing
MRC Toxicology Unit, Hodgkin Building,
University of Leicester, UK