The rats were originally generated by the University of Michigan Transgenic Animal Model Core, University of Michigan. They used a Crl:CD(SD) sub strain of Sprague-Dawley rats, obtained from Charles River Laboratory (Wilmington, MA, USA). The F1 rats have been bred in the UK with Hsd:Sprague Dawley (Harlan laboratories, UK), which are direct descendants of the original 1925 SD-company colony (Madison, Wisconsin, USA). The GFAP-TK rat was generated by pronuclear injection of a Gfap-Tk Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) construct, engineered using RedET-mediated homologous recombination methods.
Rats show no phenotype until dosed with the antiviral agant ganciclovir.
Chronic dosing at 10mg/kg/day via subcutaneous minipump for 21 days results in a loss of DCX-positive cells in the dentate gyrus and subventricular zone.