The Sydney Morning Herald is having a look at the mouse sperm collections of the Australian National University:
Mice are ideally suited as animal models to study human illnesses, says Dr Stuart Read, the curator of the Australian Phenome Bank, which is based at the Australian National University. They reproduce quickly and have genes similar to ours. ”And they are susceptible to most of the same diseases as humans,” he says.
Unlike financial banks, the mouse bank offers it services for free to Australian medical researchers. The federally funded facility collects and archives sperm and embryos from mouse strains that scientists have developed or imported.
It also ”reanimates” the sperm, injecting them into eggs to produce new mice for those who want to study that particular strain.
Someone’s got to do it!
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