XTENSIVE studies have been carried out on serum transferrin polymorphE isms of various vertebrates including man, and reviewed comprehensively by several workers (GIBLETT 1962; BEARN and CLEVE 1966; and LUSH 1966). In the order Rodentia, transferrin variations have so far been reported in only a few species: the laboratory mouse, Mus musculus ( COHEN 1960; SHREFFLER 1960; KLEIN, ROOP and Roop 1...

Major introductions of roof rats (Rattus rattus) likely occurred in the ports of East Africa during the Third Plague Pandemic in the late 1800’s. Transport via trains, boats, and trucking likely introduced this species to inland areas of East Africa, ultimately including Northwest Uganda. Historic plague outbreaks occurred during the early part of the 20th century and continue to cause a human ...

We examined pelage color variation in wild populations of black rats (the Rattus rattus species complex) in the Yambaru forest area, northern Okinawa Island, Ryukyu Archipelago, Japan. Our field study revealed that 8.7% (38/438) and 0.2% (4/2500) of rats exhibited two types of coat color: white spotting and melanism, respectively. Using 34 representative animals, the phylogeography of the popul...

Murine typhus, an acute febrile illness caused by Rickettsia typhi, is distributed worldwide. Mainly transmitted by the fleas of rodents, it is associated with cities and ports where urban rats (Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus) are abundant. In the United States, cases are concentrated in suburban areas of Texas and California. Contrary to the classic rat-flea-rat cycle, the most important ...

The application of commercially available microsatellite primers, developed for genomic analysis of the laboratory rat (Rattus norvegicus) and laboratory mouse (Mus musculus), to the genotyping of wild rodents provides a rapid and inexpensive alternative to cloning, sequencing and synthesizing species-specific primers de novo. The effort required to identify a useful panel of heterologous (inte...

This study investigated the occurrence of rotavirus in porcine and Rattus norvegicus, at the same time, on a pig farm in the city of Jaguariúna, São Paulo, Brazil. Swine (n = 21) and rat (n = 6) fecal samples were analyzed by nested RT-PCR assay. Rotavirus occurred in seven porcine and two rat samples. A total of three pig and one rat samples were further submitted to genetic sequencing. The pa...

We examined genetic variation in black rats (the Rattus rattus complex) from Kandy District, Sri Lanka using mitochondrial cytochrome b (cytb, 1140 bp) and nuclear melanocortin 1 receptor (Mc1r, 954 bp) gene sequences together with database sequences. We confirmed the existence of two divergent mitochondrial lineages in Sri Lankan black rats, with genetic distance of 2.2% and estimated divergen...

New Zealand has four rodent species, the ship rat (Rattus rattus L.), Norway rat (R. norvegicus Berkenhout), kiore (or Polynesian rat, R. exulans Peale) and the house mouse (Mus musculus L.), all of which have been introduced. Their presence has implications for conservation management as they prey on native bird (Bell, 1978; King, 1984), reptile (Whitaker, 1978) and invertebrate (Ramsey, 1978;...

background: the species of ectoparasites that live on a specific host in a geographical region form an ectoparasite community. species abundance distributions describe the number of individuals observed for each different species that is encountered within a community. based on properties of the species abundance distribution, the expected total number of species present in the community can be...