Indian sumo rat may hold key to anti-obesity drug

PTI - Hyderabad

The world’s fattest rats at the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) here — that are believed to contain hitherto undiscovered obesity genes — are the focus of a new joint project for scientists from india and the US. “If, as we believe, this is a new obesity gene, it could have major implications,” says Nappan Veettil Giridharan, deputy director of NIN, the key scientist responsible for developing the indian sumo. Giridharan told that all evidence indicates that the genes may differ from obese rat models currently available. The NIN maintains a colony of about 400 sumo rats in their twenty-first generation.

Like other rodent models, the sumo rats serve as good paradigms for human disorders such as diabetes and infertility.