Honestly, for PCR, this is a larger N than I would guess is needed. In general, rats kept in constant conditions don't have a ton of variation, even in fairly h

Honestly, for PCR, this is a larger N than I would guess is needed. In general, rats kept in constant conditions don't have a ton of variation, even in fairly high-sensitivity assays. I would expect a lot more samples if you were sampling wild rats from the subway system. I recently looked at a disease course over time for several hundred genes. I only used 6 animals per time point, and both the disease mice and non-disease mice have very little inter-mouse variation at each time point for the vast majority of the genes.