The laboratory rat is an important laboratory animal with multiple well-defined inbred strains, including some of the most widely used animal models of human diseases. Recent advances in the development of rat genetic resources will enable the exploitation of the full potential of rat models of human diseases and, in addition, the rat can provide useful information for comparative genomics of humans and mice. In the current review, we describe the development of congenics strains by introgression of differential chromosome segments from the Brown Norway (BN) rat to the genetic background of the spontaneously hypertensive rat (SHR). These SHR.BN-congenic strains and recombinant sublines derived from them were developed as a model system for genetic analysis of multifactorially determined pathophysiological and morphological conditions.