CONGENITAL MALFORMATIONS INDUCED IN RATS BY MATERNAL NUTRITIONAL DEFICIENCY

Abstract

The appearance of congenital malformations in the offspring of female rats reared and bred on a deficient diet has been described previously.¹ The deficient diet referred to is essentially the Steenbock and Black diet 2965² supplemented with viosterol in oil to forestall the development of rickets. This diet, which we call diet 1, has the following percentage composition: yellow corn meal, 76; wheat gluten, 20; chemically pure calcium carbonate, 3, and chemically pure sodium chloride, 1. Sixty U. S. P. units of vitamin D (as viosterol in oil) was administered to each female by pipet every tenth day. Up to the time of writing this report the offspring obtained on this diet consist of 761 young. Five hundred and seventeen of these have been normal and 244 (32 per cent) abnormal. The abnormalities were frequently recognized on external inspection (fig. 1). The defects of the skeletal system, which