Breeding

Breeding and Mouse Supply Services

Breeding Services

Bioresources offer a full colony management service for all wild type and GM animals with animal lines being maintained centrally in a high health status area and supplied for experimental purposes to a separate area of the facility. This service saves you time, ensures we maintain the quality of the animal produced, maintain high and consistent welfare standards, and keeps costs as low as possible. We can breed, maintain and provide any strain to you as required – either your own lines or lines we supply centrally - allowing you to reduce the time you spend managing rodent colonies and focus more time on your research.

We will work with you on a one-to-one to basis to develop and execute breeding plans, troubleshoot difficulties and deliver cohorts of study animals. All of the work is managed through our Colony Management System, E-mus, which streamlines technician workflow, simplifies project management and provides a two-way communication portal for all researchers to direct actions with their colonies, such as setting up matings, requesting animals, arranging biopsies for genotyping and consolidating space. The use of E-mus combined with our husbandry services offers more information, more control, and a more efficient management of workload than the historical system where each colony or project is managed independently using different protocols.

The Breeding Service is not a replacement of researcher involvement and we offer two different levels of service to suit individual researcher’s needs.

Breeding Service Levels and Benefits

Partial service. This is where you control all aspects of your colony by using the E-mus portal to manage details down to individual mouse selection for breeding pairs, and we act entirely on your requests. This allows you to manage the colony without having to physically do all the work, whilst receiving the best husbandry practices in animal breeding and care from Bioresources staff.

Full service. We will take control of your colonies, working on initial guidelines provided by you. We will sit down and discuss your requirements, and get all the information required such as genotypes, cohort numbers, gender, frequency and age of animals. This will allow us to manage the colony accordingly and provide you with the mice you need. You are welcome to come and see your colonies at any time, but it takes the bulk of the work off your hands.

Regardless of the service you choose, Bioresources animal care procedures include provision of sterilized bedding, irradiated feed, sterile drinking water and enrichment. Technicians operate to strict SOPs as they handle cages and mice, to minimise the risk of cross contamination between animals. All cage cleaning and sterilising equipment is monitored for effective decontamination of processed equipment and supplies. All animals are rederived into the facility; see our Rederivation links for further details of how we can cost-effectively rederive your colony to SOPF status.

Genetic Quality Control

Genetic drift is common in inbred mouse colonies, it happens slowly, and without control can result in;

• Inbreeding depression, which reduces the breeding efficiency, vigour of the animals and increases cost;
• Unwanted spontaneous mutations becoming fixed in your colonies such that unwanted genotypic effects confound experimental interpretation

Bioresources will produce and supply wild type mice for breeding with GM mice. Our QC program limits cumulative genetic drift as we refresh our foundation stocks either using our own cryopreserved embryos or by acquiring fresh breeding stocks from reliable approved suppliers to replenish our founder breeding stock every ten generations.

An additional advantage of using our breeding services is our knowledge and experience in managing genetically modified and wild type inbred or outbred mouse colonies. We maintain colonies with very stringent SOPs that follow proven mouse husbandry methods considered to be best practice. By working in a standardised and methodical way, we avoid any risk of contamination of lines, pick up early recognition of any strain contamination, provide detailed breeding records and with the additional precaution of periodical whole genome genotyping we increase the likelihood of identifying errors before they impact on your research.

Health Monitoring

Our facility operates to SOPF ( Specified and Opportunistic Pathogen Free) standards. Standardised sentinel health screening systems monitor the health status of the animals in the facility. We have a regular and comprehensive screening program that is above the FELASA guidelines and is termed FELASA-Plus. Our Rederivation Service will ensure your animals achieve this status, which is required for import into our facility.