Title: Mary Lyon Centre, International Facility for Mouse Genetics, MRC Harwell
Funder: Medical Research Council

Abstract: The mouse remains the model organism of choice for many genetic studies. With the onset of large scale genomic studies such as Genomics England and the increased drive for more standardised and robust experiments involving laboratory animals, the Mary Lyon Centre offers high quality and accessible services in mouse genetics to the UK Biomedical community. The Mary Lyon Centre (MLC) The Mary Lyon is a state of the art animal facility with specific opportunistic pathogen free (SPF) health status. The MLC provides animal care for in excess of 50k mice at any one time and science support for the Mammalian Genetics Unit (MGU), the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC) and other academic and commercial researchers. The MLC is operationally divided into 4 departments: • Operations and Phenotyping (animal husbandry, phenotyping, technical support, facilities management) • Biological Resources (line generation, archiving and dissemination of genetically altered (GA) lines • Pathology (clinical and anatomical pathology) • Molecular and Cellular Biology (design, preparation, quality control of genomic alteration; expression studies and developmental imaging). Although animal care and welfare is at the centre of the MLC service, we have extended the support we offer to researchers using laboratory animals by providing extensive technical and scientific expertise in laboratory animal science. Our intention is to provide science-led service delivery, developing and improving scientific and technical laboratory animal services within a culture of animal care. The great advantage of a unit the size of the MLC is that at any one time we retain the critical mass of trained and skilled personnel to be able to sustain a continuous service to our users. The collective experience and training of the MLC staff means that it is able to offer proficient, effective and well performed animal procedures, thereby ensuring good animal welfare and efficient animal use. Involvement in national and international activities and training: We believe that good animal science can only be done in close collaboration with other institutes and organisations, giving us exposure to new practices and benchmarking opportunities. We also recognise that as a mature facility, with a team containing significant expertise and experience, we have a considerable amount to offer the animal science community. To this end, the senior management team of the MLC are involved in many national and international committees and groups. In addition, MLC staff frequently act in an advisory capacity, within their specialist areas, to new facilities or services or those under review. Furthermore, as the use of mouse models has increased, MLC staff have become increasingly involved in training and organisations such as the Wellcome Trust, EMMA, NC3Rs and RSPCA which have looked to Harwell for expertise and leadership. The commitment to these activities involves a significant amount of staff time and resources. Moreover, we plan to continue to extend our influence and involvement in UK animal science in the coming years, especially in the areas of the 3Rs, legislative control, pathology, archiving and dissemination of mouse lines and training in mouse genetics.


Research activity codes: 2.1 BIOLOGICAL AND ENDOGENOUS FACTORS;2.6 RESOURCES AND INFRASTRUCTURE (AETIOLOGY)
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE