Colony Management

AN EXTENSION OF YOUR LAB

Colony Management

Our experts manage simple or complex projects on time and within budget. By maintaining colonies just for you, we ensure you get the mice you need, when you need them, allowing you to focus on your research and therapeutic development.

Colony Management Solutions

Breeding Services

Breeding Services provides colony options designed to be flexible with your research or therapeutic development goals. The colony options include:

Dedicated Colony: We can start with either frozen germplasm or live breeders (when available) to establish and maintain a dedicated colony of any JAX mouse. Our plans integrate known strain genotype, husbandry and phenotype details with the client's goals to insure the project timeline and budgets are well understood and executed on.

Custom Client Colony: In this case, we will create a custom colony with your specific strain.

Aging Colony: Using either JAX® Mice or your mice, we are able to breed and build an aged colony so you can get the aged mice you need, when you need them.

No matter which colony is right for you, your mice are ready when you need them, saving you vivarium space and resources.

Aging Services

Some diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and cancer, develop later in life— both in humans and mice. We will age and deliver mice to you when they reach an age appropriate for your research.

From aged models where we age your unique strain or any of the over 12,000 strains of JAX® Mice, to the aged tissue bank where you can order exactly what you need, we’ve got you covered.

Request a quote.

Cryopreservation

One of the ways to dramatically reduce costs associated with colony maintenance and protect your strains is through the cryopreservation of sperm or embryos.

Not only does it protect your valuable mouse strains against disease, breeding cessation and disasters, cryopreservation also protects your research by limiting genetic drift, preventing the spontaneous loss of phenotype, and facilitating easy strain distribution to partners and fellow researchers.

Cryorecovery, Rederivation, Strain Rescue

Every year, we successfully cryorecover over 2,500 strains from sperm and embryos for researchers around the world. When you use JAX’s Sperm Cryopreservation Service or our Sperm Cryo Kit to cryopreserve your strains, we can produce live mice for you in as little as nine weeks yielding an average of ten pups. For larger cohorts, we offer an IVF Expansion Service.

If you’re looking to bring a live mouse back to industry standards, or are struggling with breeding cessation, we invite you to explore our rederivation and strain rescue services.

Supporting Technologies

Colony maintenance, including maintaining a healthy vivarium, requires significant time and resources. Through our facilities here, we can be an extension of your lab as we will start and maintain your colony for the duration of your project.

In addition to providing you with a dedicated colony supply, we offer additional services including:

  • Congenic services that include strain importation and rederivation, genotyping, genome-wide SNP scanning, and breeding
  • Expansion services generating hundreds of mice to expand your unique colonies or to generate cohorts of JAX® Mice that are only available in limited supply
  • Genome scanning to develop congenic lines in your lab, confirm strain identity, and monitor genetic quality.

Donate a Strain

Donating your strain to JAX fulfills NIH obligations to share mice with other scientists, while significantly reducing the cost of maintaining your mouse models. By donating your strain, you are protected against accidental loss and genetic contamination through cryopreservation. Whenever you are ready, JAX will perform rederivation of each imported strain to a high health status and may be resupplied to the donating investigator.

Learn more about strain donation.

Colony Management Online Resources

Talk to an Expert

Speak to Customer Service

micetech@jax.org
1.800.422.6423 (US)
1.207.288.5845 (International)

JAX Technical Help

Our technical scientists have curated lists of commonly asked questions. Check here for any question you have about your model, study, or procedure.

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