Mouse Breeding & Colony Management Services | Industry-Leading Care with JAX

As the industry leader in laboratory mouse breeding, care, and colony management, we know how complex—and fragile—animal research can be. Maintaining animal colonies and developing experimental models requires significant energy, time, and planning. And just one unexpected event like a freezer failure, pathogen outbreak, breeding setback, genotyping issues, natural disaster, or funding gap can jeopardize years of progress.

That is why we offer an extensive portfolio of colony management services, built on nearly 100 years of expertise, to help ensure the security of your strains and streamline your research efforts. From custom model generation and cryopreservation to colony management and rapid cohort expansion, we offer services designed to minimize research delays, scale your mouse colony efficiently, and support your work at every stage.

Below is a quick-reference guide to our colony management offerings.

Custom Breeding Service

Send JAX your mice, and we will rederive them to the highest health status and manage the colony for you. With JAXConnect™, you stay fully informed and in control, with 24/7 access to colony data and direct collaboration with the team caring for your mice. Colonies can be aged and/or maintained on custom diets and integrated with our surgical, necropsy, and preclinical research services. Custom breeding is ideal for facilities with limited vivarium space, challenging breeders, complex breeding or genotyping requirements, or projects that require reliable cohorts throughout the year. We can scale colonies up or down efficiently based on our extensive expertise and additional colony management options, like IVF expansion.
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Dedicated Supply Breeding Service

Select any JAX® Mice strain—cryopreserved or from a live colony—and we will establish a private colony accessible only to you and your designated collaborators. We can also generate custom crosses between JAX Mice strains or between JAX Mice and mice you provide. These colonies are maintained exclusively for your group at the highest health status and are integrated into the JAXConnect™ platform for continuous access to colony data. Dedicated supply is ideal when you need secure, reliable, and controlled access to mice for ongoing or long-term studies, especially when using a JAX cryopreserved strain.
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IVF Expansion

Need dozens or hundreds of age-matched mice fast? With IVF expansion, we can rapidly scale mouse colonies up to 4x faster than traditional breeding using only two male carrier mice. This service is ideal for quickly producing large quantities of same-age mice on a common genetic background, for strains with males that have a shortened lifespan or breeding window (e.g., neuromuscular and neurological disorder models), and for cost-effective scaling of customer colonies (via custom breeding service) or limited-supply JAX® Mice (via dedicated supply breeding service).
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Rederivation

Pathogen outbreaks, relocating your laboratory, importing mice from a collaborator, etc., can jeopardize the size or continuity of your colony. Our rederivation service can help reestablish your strain(s) at the highest health status. This service can be combined with cryopreservation to safeguard against future risks, IVF expansion for rapid scale-up, and custom breeding to rebuild your colony. We offer both standard and custom rederivation services tailored to the number of mutations in your strain and its genetic background.
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Strain Rescue

Breeding cessation is a challenging reality of working with mice. If you are managing your own colonies and have a strain at high risk of breeding failure, JAX can help rescue your strain from loss. Send JAX your older males and/or females who have failed to breed naturally, and we will develop a customized plan utilizing assisted reproductive technologies (IVF, hormone stimulation, ovarian transplant, etc.) to try to rescue your strain. Any recovered mice are at SOPF status and can be shipped directly to you, or we can maintain a colony for you.
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Sperm Cryopreservation

Sperm cryopreservation is a fast, cost-effective way to secure your valuable mouse models. Simply send us two healthy male mice, and we will cryopreserve 20 straws of sperm. One of the biggest advantages of sperm cryopreservation is scalability: each sample contains millions of sperm, enabling efficient generation of large cohorts during recovery. This makes it an ideal approach for labs needing rapid colony regeneration or large-scale experimental cohorts of mice carrying a single mutation on a common genetic background.
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Standard Embryo Cryopreservation

Cryopreservation is a key proactive strategy for efficient colony management and risk mitigation. For standard embryo cryopreservation, you send JAX your healthy male mice as sperm donors and use female JAX Mice® as oocyte donors. We will cryopreserve and store at least 250 two-cell embryos in 10 straws (though we target: 30 embryos/straw). All frozen material is stored in two geographically separate locations to ensure maximum security of your strains. When live mice are needed, we can perform cryorecovery at the highest health status and ship you mice and/or straws as needed. Standard embryo cryopreservation is ideal for strains carrying multiple mutations on a common genetic background.
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Custom Embryo Cryopreservation

Through this service, you send JAX both your healthy male and female mice, and we will cryopreserve and store at least 250 two-cell embryos. Storage and cryorecovery follow the same secure procedures as our standard embryo cryopreservation. Custom embryo cryopreservation is ideal for strains carrying multiple mutations, those on a unique genetic background, or when homozygotes are needed immediately upon recovery.
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Long-Term Cryopreservation Storage

We offer both short- and long-term storage options for sperm and embryo cryopreservation, available to all researchers – whether the material was cryopreserved by us, by you using our sperm cryopreservation kit, or by your CORE facility or another vendor. Storing material in multiple locations is considered best practice to safeguard your valuable strains and protect against unexpected facility failures. All JAX storage tanks are auto-filled, alarmed, routinely inspected, and monitored 24/7 in two geographically separated secure facilities to ensure the highest level of protection.
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Cryorecovery

We successfully recover over 2,500 strains each year for researchers worldwide. JAX can recover strains from material we cryopreserved and stored for you, from your own or your collaborators’ frozen stocks, or from material shipped to us by other repositories. Mice are recovered at the highest health status and can be shipped directly to you or a collaborator, or we can establish and maintain a live breeding colony for you (custom breeding service) with rapid scale-up available through IVF expansion.
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Frozen Mouse Sperm and Embryos

Having trouble accepting live mice deliveries or want to avoid the time constraints of quarantine? Over 75% of JAX strains are now accessible as frozen embryos or sperm to perform your own in-house IVF. All sperm and embryos are collected and cryopreserved in our highest-barrier facility, with embryos undergoing multiple washes to ensure they arrive clean and ready for your research. Simplified protocols are also available to guide you through the initial steps of thawing straws and vials.
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Custom Model Generation

With a 97% success rate and experience generating custom models from over 200 different strains, we leverage a range of advanced genome-engineering technologies to create the precise model needed. Every project begins with a free consultation to assess feasibility and design an optimal, goal-aligned strategy. Many custom projects include our no-risk guarantee – if we don’t deliver the model, you don’t pay.
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Genome Scanning

Genetic background can influence phenotype. Mice carrying the same mutation on different genetic backgrounds can present different phenotypes. Therefore, it is important to choose, confirm, and maintain a strain's background for reliable research. If you are maintaining mouse colonies in your own facility, our single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based genome scanning service provides a way to verify and monitor the genetic background of your mice. With our easy sample collection kit, we can help you confirm strain background, monitor genetic quality, detect contamination (e.g., human breeding errors), and streamline marker-assisted breeding selection to efficiently create congenic lines or move mutations onto new backgrounds.
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Speed Congenics

If you want to move your genetically modified mice to a different genetic background quickly, we can do it for you. By combining genome scanning with optimized breeding strategies, we backcross your strain to the target congenic background twice as fast as traditional methods. At completion, we will deliver two breeding pairs that are >99% congenic backcrossed mice. If rapid scale-up is needed, we can establish a custom breeding colony for you and expand using IVF expansion.
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