JAX® Colony Maintenance and Production Services Offer Researchers Economies of Time, Money, and Space

JAX® NOTES Issue 509, Spring 2008

Most researchers face an often daunting task: how to divide limited funds among the competing needs of equipment, personnel, and supplies, while concurrently focusing on their primary mission - successful research. The Jackson Laboratory, through its JAX® Services Group, can help. How? By offering researchers the opportunity to outsource certain routine tasks, like colony maintenance and production. By using JAX® Services for these needs, researchers can concentrate more on their work and less on routine management tasks.

Flexible film isolators in our
Jackson Laboratory—West Facility.

For nearly 80 years, we at The Jackson Laboratory have been maintaining and breeding mice for biomedical research. We operate the world's largest repository of research mouse models, nearly 1,000 of which we maintain as live colonies. Our experience in developing and implementing simple to highly complex breeding schemes, combined with our pioneering in vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques, allow us to deliver custom breeding services cost-effectively. (Visit our breeding services webpage to view our new weekly cage-based pricing and easily compare our pricing to your internal rates).

Custom breeding, aging, and feeding protocols are available from our Maine or California facilities and mice can be shipped to you as needed. Our California facility can also perform projects which require housing mice in flexible film isolators. Our programs include the following:

  • Speed Expansion - Leveraging our unparalleled expertise with IVF techniques, we can quickly and cost-effectively expand your colonies, allowing you to start your breeding projects sooner and with larger numbers of rederived specific pathogen free (SPF) mice;
  • Aging - In some mouse strains, disease conditions develop only with age. We can maintain colonies of JAX® Mice or customer-supplied mice, and deliver them to you at the appropriate age for your research;
  • Special Diets - We can maintain mice on special diets. We'll help you choose the right strain, study diet, control diet, housing conditions, project duration, and ideal regimen for collecting data and biospecimens;
  • Dedicated Supply - We can produce custom colonies of age- and sex-specific SPF JAX® Mice from stocks that are either cryopreserved or normally available in limited quantities.

If you're running out of mouse room space, need to rederive your colony to a higher health status, want a steady supply of mice that are difficult to maintain or find in the quantities you need, need expert assistance managing simple or complex, multiple gene crossbreeding projects, or if you simply want to spend more time on your research contact JAX® Services today at 1-800-422-6423, 1-207-288-5845, or jaxservices@jax.org.

Why Choose JAX® Colony Maintenance and Production Services?

  • Experience breeding more than 3,500 unique mouse strains as well as highly complex breeding programs
  • Highly skilled and experienced technicians
  • Pioneering IVF techniques, facilitating rapid colony expansion and project initiation
  • Scientific support from world-renowned Jackson Laboratory researchers
  • Established reputation for delivering projects on schedule and within budge