Arvicanthis niloticus (Nile rat) genome, mArvNil1

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.