Both Wistar and Sprague-Dawley rat strains have been used for experimental studies on lipoprotein metabolism, although the lipoprotein characteristics of the former strain are less well known than those of the latter. We have defined more precise conditions for separating by density gradient ultracentrifugation the different lipoprotein classes from plasma of young male Wistar rats. Present results confirm that Wistar rats, like other rat strains, have negligible amounts of low density lipoproteins and levels of very low density lipoproteins much lower than high density lipoproteins. The differences between rat strains appeared in the profile of lipoprotein denser than 1.08 g/ml. In fact, we showed Wistar rats have considerable amounts of high density lipoprotein-3 subfraction with a density range between 1.17 and 1.21 g/ml, a mean diameter of 4.9 nm, and a low cholesterol content. In analogy with the Sprague-Dawley strain, Wistar rats had a small proportion of high density lipoprotein-1 subfraction (about 17% of total lipoproteins) and, at variance, in Wistar rats, we did not observe the presence of the so-called very high density lipoprotein fraction described previously in the Sprague-Dawley strain.
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Cantàfora et al. (1993) studied this question.