Services

Consultation

With over 20 years of experience in both cell culture and mouse work at MIT, we can offer considerable guidance and expertise with most aspects of tissue culture troubleshooting, CAC protocols, rodent breeding, design of robust animal experiments, and procedures. 

Specialized Cell Culture

• Provide a list of and access to cell lines available from other researchers on campus
• Optimized culture of cells and preparation for their injection into animals
• Generation of new cell lines from tumor or other mouse tissue
• Isolate primary cells from mouse tissue such as hepatocytes or splenocytes
• Transient or stable transfection of a cell line of your choice
• Collect and culture mouse blastocytes and mouse embryonic cells
• Directed differentiation of mouse ES cells

Quality Control for Cell Lines

• Mycoplasma testing of your cell line, occurs weekly on Tuesday mornings
• Prep cells for STR analysis at ATCC to authenticate a cell line and rule out contamination by another cell line
• Prep cells for IMPACT Testing- required by CAC and DCM for all cells that are placed into animals
• Prep cells for karyotyping at Cell Line Genetics

Gene Editing (CRISPR) & Gene Targeting in Animals

Design  and completion of custom projects to generate novel mouse models for your experiments. Together with DCM's transgenics core, we regularly produce mice with:

• point mutations
• HA or FLAG tags
• conditional knockouts or knock ins
• novel FLEX alleles

Provide assistance and training in mouse embryo analysis and mouse phenotyping

Training options include, but are not limited to:

• Culture of ES cells
• Generation of new ES cell lines
• Isolation and culture of blastocysts
• Generation of MEFS
• Isolation of mouse embryos for histology or other analysis
• Differentiation of ES  cells to specific tissue type
• Optimizing breeding conditions for mice

Provide reagents needed for specialized cell culture

• Media, serum and additives for stem cells and other finicky cells
• Vials of 3x10⁶ irradiated MEFS for use as feeders for stem cells
• Vial of p1 MEFs
• Vial of germline-proven mouse ES cells

Other services are also available on a limited bases, please inquire to the KI Preclinical Modeling Core Staff (escore@mit.edu) if you are interested.

C57BL/6J mice are housed in the super-clean, barrier facility and can be transferred to any animal facility on the MIT campus. The colony is maintained at a minimal level to reduce cost and it may take a few weeks to provide more than 4-5 mice of the same gender for a strain. We are happy to build up a colony if you need more, but let us know so that we can plan ahead.

To order mice, please create a request in iLab.