Dear Sanjukta,

Swiss Albino is usually used in toxicology studies. It is not often used in R&D studies. Swiss being an outbred animal, is suitable for toxicology as it has variability between animals. However, if you take other inbred animals such as BALB/c, C57BL/6, etc, they are very similar and you would not have so much variations between animals.

Since you want to know the toxicity of a product in a population with difference in genetics, we use swiss in tox studies.

For R&D when you want to make any animal model of human diseases, inbred mice would be suitable as experiments would be reproducible in these strains. Reproducibility in an outbred mice would be much lesser.

Genetic monitoring can be used to check the homogeneity in an inbred strain and verify if any contamination has occurred (between different strains of same colour). For strains of different colours, contamination can be identified by visual observations.

Hope this answers your question.

Bobby