Mouse lines

Our lab makes any published mouse lines that were established in our lab available to other research facilities. If you are interested in a particular strain, please send your request to Dr Janet Rossant with a brief description of your research interests and the experiments you would like to use the mice for. Many of our mouse lines are frozen away and stored with the CMMR (Canadian Mouse Mutant Repository) of the TCP (Toronto Centre for Phenogenomics), and will be made available from them on a cost-recovery basis.

Several years ago we began shipping mice as blastocysts, rather than as live mice. This has proved a very successful-and less expensive-procedure. Details are given, below.

Embryo Shipments

Our facility has been successfully shipping embryos rather than mice to other animal facilities for several years. There are many advantages to this:

• cost of shipment
• less waiting time
• avoiding clean/dirty facility problems

Mice from our facility are considered "dirty", as they are infected with MHV, among other things. Mice typically acquire MHV after being exposed to the virus from their mother at birth. Sending embryos, and transferring into clean mice, avoids this exposure. We have been shipping embryos for the past 4 years to facilities that are cleaner than ours, and none of them have reported any problems with mice derived using this protocol, even several years after receiving them. Therefore it appears to be a fast, cheap and effective way to ship mice and clean them up.

if you would like further details for this protocol.