We report the strain dependence of the Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillations of InAs-based heterostructures and discuss the controllability of the Dresselhaus effect. Our heterostructures were designed to possess symmetric band structure to eliminate the Rashba effect, and its channel is naturally and compressively strained due to lattice mismatch in the InP (1 0 0) substrate. Slight mechanical tensile strain turned out to modify the SdH oscillations from complex to simple ones. The highly distorted oscillations at natural state resemble the ones commonly observed when the second sub-band is occupied, though we confirmed that the second sub-band is not occupied in our structure. Gate modulation further enhanced the distortion and we did not observe beating at any gate voltages. Taking the large Zeeman effect in InAs into account, obtained results indicate that the interaction between spin-orbit (SO) interaction and Zeeman effect caused the unequal shift of spin-up and spin-down Landau levels (LLs) and their hybridization. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.