NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The mouse research facility at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which has housed mutant mouse genetic research programs for decades, will soon leave its home in Tennessee and will be replaced with computational biology and biomolecular research for energy studies, ORNL said last week.
The colony of 8,000 mice, which are referred to as the Collaborative Cross, will relocate to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Tennessee facility will be used for research that will involve developing a new generation of biofuels and ways of capturing and removing carbon emissions from the environment, Gary Jacobs, interim associate lab director of ORNL’s Biological and Environmental Sciences Directorate, said in a statement.
The mouse genetics research program began after World War Two as a way to study the effects of radiation, and it is currently managed by the University of Tennesee-Battelle.