Naturally occurring left ventricular hyperplasia is a rare but lethal disease. There are very few reports of this cardiac disease in captive nonhuman primates. In a colony of Macaca mulatta (Rhesus monkey) at California National Primate Research Center, a large number of rhesus macaques were diagnosed by autopsy with naturally occurring left ventricular hypertrophy without obvious underlying diseases over a 22-year period. The confirmatory diagnosis of ventricular hypertrophy was based on findings of notable left ventricular concentric hypertrophy with reduced left ventricular lumen, which is very similar to human ventricular hypertrophy cases. This report discusses an 11-year-old Macaca fascicularis monkey (Cynomolgus monkey, crab-eating macaque), weighing 2.95 kg, that was presented for enrollment in a pharmacokinetic (PK) study. During the PK experiment, the monkey died following a sudden decrease in percutaneous oxygen saturation and heart rate. Gross and histological examinations of the heart were performed. On gross pathology, the left ventricular wall was thickened, and the chamber lumen was reduced. In histopathological examination using hematoxylin- eosin and Masson-trichrome stains, fibrosis and myocyte disarray were not observed, but an increased cell density, compared to the normal heart, was confirmed. The autopsy results confirmed left ventricular hyperplasia as the major cause of death.

Regulations in the EU, Japan, Korea, etc. require that foods and feeds made of or derived from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) should be approved and labeled according to a threshold. Recently, disease resistant transgenic rice was developed in Korea, which resulted from the transformation events involving choline kinase gene, OsCK1. In order to monitor unintended release of the developed GM rice in the near future, as well as to meet GM-labeling requirements, the development of a reliable method for detection of disease resistant GM rice is requisite. Here, specific primer pairs for the detection of GMO was designed on the basis of a introduced gene and the flanking junction sequences between a plant DNA and a integrated gene construct, and also SPS gene was used as an endogenous reference material. Specificities of all designed primers were tested through qualitative PCRs. Clearly, target specific amplicons could be detected from disease resistant GM rice event. In addition, the limits of detection (LOD) using the event-specific primers were approximately 0.1% for the disease resistant GM rice line. This result indicated that the developed detection method is suitable for the traceability of disease resistant GM rice, because of using the primer specifically corresponded to the junction site between plant genomic DNA and inserted DNA. Keywords: genetically modified organisms, disease resistant GM rice, PCR detection, event-specific primer