Hi Bamidele,

Several options:

1/ put on young rats (before weaning) and mother on iron deficient diet. Young rat needs iron to grow. If iron lacks it becomes anemic. 100% affective.

2/ bleed your rats.

I prefer the (1) but it is more expensive (iron deficient chow) than (2).

Good luck.

Gael

Thanks, for your help. But that kind of feed is scarse here. Option two is okay;but to what degree should one bleed the animals? Any drug available for this purpose?

I recently worked on iron deficiency anemia and what we did was to bleed the rats through the retro-orbital sinus. You can vary the degree of anemia by bleeding 10% or 20% of blood volume. Blood volume of each rat is a function of its weight. The formula is Blood volume (ml) = 0.06 x body weight (g) + 0.77 (Lee and Blaufox 1985). The bleeding is best done under light anaesthesia.

Dear, use phenylhydrazine to induce anaemia and then go on with the study.

This link of article is helpful

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/8569161/

Regards