The Rat Genome Database is a collection of genetic and genomic information on the rat

Rat

Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents of the superfamily Muroidea. "True rats" are members of the genus Rattus, the most important of which to humans are the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus...

. Development and maintenance of RGD began in 1995 and is funded by the United States National Institutes of Health

National Institutes of Health

The National Institutes of Health are an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and are the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and health-related research. Its science and engineering counterpart is the National Science Foundation...

 and hosted at the Medical College of Wisconsin

Medical College of Wisconsin

Medical College of Wisconsin is a private, freestanding medical school and graduate school located in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. It was formerly affiliated with Marquette University....

. The rat is a major model organism

Model organism

A model organism is a non-human species that is extensively studied to understand particular biological phenomena, with the expectation that discoveries made in the organism model will provide insight into the workings of other organisms. Model organisms are in vivo models and are widely used to...

 for the study of human disease, which has prompted the development of a "Disease Portal", in association with RGD. The Bioinformatics Research Center was originally founded by Dr Peter Tonellato. A number of other significant projects have spawned globally from this project and lead to global collaboration across multiple countries. One such tool of significance is GBrowse by Lincoln Stein

Lincoln Stein

Professor Lincoln D. Stein is a scientist and leader in bioinformatics and computational biology at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Current projects include Reactome, WormBase,, BioPerl, , ENCODE , the Generic Model Organism Database and Cloud computing...

, which is an open-source web interface to genome project databases.
It was revealed that rats share about 90% of human genes.

Data types

• Gene reports and Sequence reports
• Quantitative trait loci (QTLs)
• Strain-specific length polymorphisms (SSLPs) for diagnostic PCR amplification products
• Expressed sequence tag (EST) reports
• Genetic maps
• Information on different rat strains
• Homology information

Publications

• Genome sequence of the Brown Norway rat yields insights into mammalian evolution Paper from Nature

Database Information

The genomic sequence is available under accession numbers AABR03000000 to AABR03137910 in the international sequence databases (GenBank, DDBJ and EMBL).