Breeding services

Maintaining the expected health status of your animal colonies is vital to achieve valid and reproducible research results.

PHENOMIN provides a controlled and reliable environment for mice and rats breeding.

Animals are maintained under strict conditions which meet high level health and welfare requirements to ensure the validity/reliability of your experimental models. Health monitoring is conducted routinely on our colonies for an extensive list of infectious agents.

Mice and Rats Housing

PHENOMIN has expertise for breeding mice and rats with all kind of genetic modifications under various types of facilities and caging systems for different microbiological security levels.

By maintaining colonies just for you, we make sure you get the mice you need, when you need them, allowing you to focus on your research project.

Housing & Breeding	MOUSE						RAT
		Conventional	SPF	SOPF	Gnotoxenic	Axenic	A2/A3	SOPF	SPF	Gnotoxenic	Axenic
Open cages		X
IVC	X	X	X				X	X
Isolators		X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X

Our capabilities include:

• Project execution within time and budget
• Managing small to complex projects
• Quickly expansion of colonies using IVF
• Integration with other PHENOMIN services, including Rederivation, Cryopreservation, Phenotyping, Genotyping, Gene expression analysis and Technical procedures or any additional related services

PHENOMIN respects and applies the European Directive about animal welfare (fore more details, see our Ethic & Welfare dedicated page).

 

For any information regarding the conditions to enter into our facilities, please contact us.

 

Phenotyping Cohort Production

PHENOMIN proposes realizing cohort production for your phenotyping program and assisting you for the design. We offer the possibility to transfert cohorts in our phenotyping platforms or to ship them in the best conditions to guarantee the health status.

Time-mated Pregnant Female Production

PHENOMIN can produce time-mated Pregnant Females for research on embryo in accordance with ethical rules. All steps are validated with our customers.

Sanitary quarantine

Sanitary quarantine is a strongly recommended step in any animal importation from an external breeding facility.

The quarantine is performed in isolator or Individual Ventilated Cages (IVC).

The period of sanitary quarantine allows complete animal health screening; our process includes the FELASA recommandations.

After this quarantine period and according to the health screening results, the animals may

• Be sent to their destination breeding facility, if their health status is appropriate
• Undergo rederivation when necessary.

Genetic drift and our recommendations

The impact of health status and genetic quality on phenotype is usually underestimated despite it participates to results reproducibility and reliability.

Genetic drift is the constant tendency of alleles' number to evolve in a population, even in the absence of selective forces.

You can reduce genetic drift's impact by :

• Cryopreserving your model: in case of genetic drift or any other problem that might affect your model, you can recover the original strain and pursue your research with a minimal lost of time and money.
• Refreshing your colony every 5-10 generations by backcrossing to the inbred strain.
• Replacing the breeders at most every 2 years. PHENOMIN is importing new breeders from its supplier twice a year.