ORNL cleans mouse house for new collection of pathogen-free mice

[John Jacobus <crispy_bird@YAHOO.COM>]

I received through  another posting and thought I

would pass it along.

 

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ORNL cleans mouse house



New Energy Department facility will be home to

entirely new collection of pathogen-free mice



By Alison McCook





All through the rooms and hallways of the Oak Ridge

National Laboratory (ORNL), not a creature is

stirring, at least not any mice. The facility that

once housed more than 200,000 mice no longer contains

a single animal. But the silence is temporary. 



In a few weeks, researchers at the Department of

Energy lab plan to begin the laborious process of

"cleaning up" their mouse collection by restocking it

from scratch with pathogen-free mice, to be housed in

a new sterile 30,000 square-foot facility.



In the past, working with potentially contaminated

mice has sometimes prevented ORNL from distributing

them or collaborating with researchers at other

facilities, who feared the spread of bugs such as

viruses, bacteria, and parasites, said ORNL geneticist

Dabney K. Johnson. 



Now, "Our animals are healthier, and they're

sharable," she said.



ORNL has spent decades conducting research on mice,

creating mutants, and testing how the mice responded

to chemicals and radiation. These experiments often

required huge numbers of mice, making it difficult to

keep them all disease-free. 



Recently, the laboratory shifted focus toward using

mice to study human diseases and the function of

certain genetic mutations, experiments that require

fewer animals and could be easily confounded by the

presence of any pathogen, Johnson said. The creation

of a new mouse house at the Oak Ridge, Tenn., compound

provided the perfect opportunity to clean the stocks,

she added.



The new mouse collection will be derived from ORNL's

library of frozen embryos, containing 900 strains of

mice, some dating back to the 1940s. During the

cleanup process, embryos will be implanted into a

pathogen-free female, and each strain will be

resurrected one by one, said Barry Berven, ORNL's

director of operations in the Life Sciences Division. 



The new facility that will house them, the Russell

Laboratory for Comparative and Functional Genomics,

will stay pathogen-free behind tightly sealed doors,

and researchers will be required to remove all street

clothing and shower before they enter, said ORNL

geneticist Brynn Voy.



The new facility can hold up to 60,000 mice, and it

likely won't take the laboratory long to reach its

full capacity, Berven said. "We'll probably be up to

10-, 15,000 by the end of the year," he predicted.



Rick Woychik, director of the Jackson Laboratory in

Bar Harbor, Maine, which also distributes mutated

mice, noted that even with "dirty" mice, ORNL was able

to share its stocks. In the past, institutions

requested ORNL strains and cleaned them up themselves,

Woychik said.



However, ORNL carries mouse strains that no other

facility has, and cleaning them up certainly makes it

easier to share them with the world, he noted. "I

think it's terrific that the ORNL has a cleaner

facility," Woychik said.



He added that many of the strains were created by

ORNL's William Russell, who died this past summer.

Indeed, the new mouse house is named for Russell and

his wife Liane. "So this is a real legacy," Woychik

said.



Links for this article

Oak Ridge National Laboratory

http://www.ornl.gov/ 



The Jackson Laboratory

http://www.jax.org/ 



B. Calandra, "William L. Russell dies," The Scientist,

July 31, 2003.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/news/20030731/02/ 

   

  ©2003, The Scientist Inc. in association with BioMed

Central. 







=====

+++++++++++++++++++

"One test result is worth one thousand expert opinions."

Wernher von Braun



-- John

John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist

e-mail:  crispy_bird@yahoo.com



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