Research Support Facility

Model Pipelines

Archive Page

This page is maintained as a historical record and is no longer being updated.

The Research Support Facility served the Institute and worldwide community by providing and caring for mice and zebrafish used in research studies.

In May 2019, the Sanger Institute made the difficult decision to close the animal facility, driven by its scientific strategy.

The facility served the Institute and the worldwide research community by:

• offering a range of services to Institute researchers
• distributing the model organism resources it maintains to the scientific community
• upholding welfare initiatives
• providing animal handling and maintenance training for other model organism facilities (in conjunction with the Wellcome Trust Advanced Courses team)
• acting as an exemplar of ethical and regulatory working practices
• delivering comprehensive training and development opportunities for Facility staff.

We were a signatory to the Concordat on Openness in Animal Research, and we organised tours for staff, school trips, partners and media to demonstrate the care and attention we gave our animals and explain how the strong law of the UK upholds animals’ welfare during procedural activity. In addition we were a Licensed establishment that upheld and championed compliance with the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 Amendment Regulations 2012. To make the real impact of procedures on the animals we cared for even more transparent we worked with the Home Office and other UK institutes on how we could improve Welfare and Severity Assessments related to our work.

We were passionate about continually improving the environment and care of our animals. Our work to develop and implement a new feeding regimen improved zebrafish growth and reduced the development of deformities and was recognised with an award. More than 20 facilities worldwide adopted our concept and our feeding regimens.

The close work of the RSF and the Mouse Pipelines allowed us to reduce animal usage by utilising archiving concepts and genotyping to store lines for future use. This was done via cryopreservation and excellent quality assurance. The distribution to archiving consortiums and other facilities allowed us to provide efficiently and well defined Fish and Mouse models to avoid duplication of animal usage.

Another area that we constantly refined was our management and accounting systems. Our Mouse Colony Management System enabled us to demonstrate, at the highest standards, our high levels of efficient production, colony management and archiving. The database wascontinually improved by the Mouse Informatics Team in conjunction with the Mouse Pipelines and Research Support Facility teams. The value of our database to optimise colony management and phenotypic data collection was evidenced by the fact that five major facilities in the UK elected to use our system.