Transgenic Platform Studies: Breeding, Mating, Techno.Reproduction, Weaning, Experimenting, Culling
The Animal Facility has developed a proprietary software for managing and tracking all the experimental mice and their kindred. These are multigenerational families that have distinct genomes. They are fed and cared for, experimented on and mated, weaned and euthanized. But, there are many and they need to be organized. The software and corresponding housing labeling cards track each animal: Room, Owner/PI (Primary Investigator, Company or Lab Head), Strain, Cage, Genetically Modified (Genome Edited) Model, ID, Progeny, Birth Date, Age, Sex, pups/litter and percent stabilization of pedigree mutation . Other details are tracked, like new, animal, fertility status, level of sexual experience, death in mating and offspring successfully edited. This software package traces transgenic family trees from grandparents to c-sections to progeny to procedures including those born, stillborn and those aborted (taken for dissection before they are born._
Beginning with purchased standardized mouse breeds, such as the Jax model B6.129, some of the kin are mutated and some are kept as Mutant blanks or Control Mice for comparison. The original mice are usually ordered worldwide from Charles River Laboratories (Boston USA) or The Jackson Laboratory (Maine, USA) According to Jax, “JAX® Mice are the best characterized and most widely used mice available. More than 80% of all mouse-related research publications that cite a strain source use JAX® Mice.”
To stabilize and offer a new repeatable brood of pedigree transgenic mice, the mutant pups need to be incested *(interbreeding, crossbreeding, back breeding) for 20 generations. That is the level of mouse incest that is required to achieve as close to the 100% homozygosity possible. This is needed for the scientific studies to be repeatable, for the mice to be available for global research, for the disease model organisms to count as progress towards a cure. But, this software is also a sort of ancestry record, a biopolitical census of a most biodiverse and most homogenized pool of breeds.
It is also a record of lives, deaths, sexual encounters and medical histories that imply a completely closed world. There is no outside of surveillance in the animal facility. These animals never see the sun. Born, bred and retired in the machinations of scientific research, the facility is all they ever know. They may be born with congenital tumors to study oncogenesis or a cure for various cancers. They may be born to infect with various kinds of deadly viruses, bacteria or chemical to look into how to prevent human plagues, septicemias and pox of various kinds. They may be bred to be born with versions of debilitating and deadly diseases, congenital, degenerative and incurable. Some mice are just there for behavioral testing. Some are controls required in an experimental design. A few are just tasked with being sentinels for life. There are the castratos and the retired breeders. But, all the mice and their ancestors and progeny are also just denizens of the facility. It is a jail, a zoo, a hospital, a concentration camp, a nursery. In some ways the mice live in the software package (interface showcased below). But, for the mice, this is their home. The facility and the system of programmed life cycles is all they know.
Breeding, Techno-Mating, Housing, Weaning and Culling, a gallery of mouse colony database archive interface storage nomenclature:
