Divergent Pattern of Development in Rats and Humans

CAMPOS EUSEBI, WANDA; IORII, TOMAS; PRESTI, ANTONELLA; GRIMSON, RAFAEL; VÁZQUEZ-BORSETTI, PABLO

NEUROTOXICITY RESEARCH

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2023 vol. 42

1029-8428

Rattus norvegicus is the second most used laboratory species and the most widely used model in neuroscience. Nonetheless,there is still no agreement regarding the temporal relationship of development between humans and rats. We addressed thisquestion by examining the time required to reach a set of homologous developmental milestones in both species. With thispurpose, a database was generated with data collected through a bibliographic survey. This database was in turn comparedwith other databases about the same topic present in the literature. Finally, the databases were combined, covering for thefirst time the entire development of the rat including the prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal periods. This combined databaseincludes 362 dates of 181 developmental events for each species. The developmental relationship between humans and ratswas better fit by a logarithmic function than by a linear function. As development progresses, an increase in the dispersionof the data is observed. Developmental relationships should not be interpreted as a univocal equivalence. In this work isproposed an alternative interpretation where the age of one species is translated into a range of ages in the other.