Storage of Dietary Manganese and Thiamine in the Rat

Abstract

The finding (Hill and Holtkamp, '48), that the manganous ion is a nutritional factor which if fed at different levels in the diet of lactating female rats may modify the age of develop ment of body-temperature control in the young, led to further work on the effect of this ion on growth (Holtkamp and Hill, '50). In the course of this work it was found that after the first generation in a colony on dietary levels of manganese of not more than 30 Mgper day, some rats developed ataxia (Hill, Holtkamp, Buchanan and Rutledge, '50). The investigation of body-temperature control (Hill and Holtkamp, '48) showed thiamine in low concentrations to be antagonistic to low con centrations of manganese. Similar antagonism, with respect to the toxicities of manganese and thiamine had been reported earlier by Perla and associates (Perla, '39; Perla and Sandberg, '39; Perla, Sandberg and Holly, '39; Sandberg, Perla and Holly, '39). Because of the apparent relationship between these two substances, it was considered advisable to determine the effect of various dietary levels of thiamine and manganese on the storage of these two substances in the liver. In our search of the literature we have not found analyses for man ganese in the wall of the intestine of the rat except in a single one-dose experiment using only two rats (Greenberg and