MacDougald Lab — Mouse Colony

Rack 7A (Room 1) — physical layout i

Click any cage for details. Orange left border = breeders inside. Gray dashed = empty slot.

Cage consolidation candidates i

Singly-housed adult females of the same strain that could be merged to save cage costs. Adult males are excluded — established singly-housed males will fight when re-introduced. ULAM allows up to 5 adult mice per ventilated cage.

What this tab shows i

Current cage costs (ULAM CY26 ventilated rate) plus a projection of what those costs become if the current Smart Cull Plan is executed. Change priorities on the Smart Cull Plan tab to see this update — the two views stay in sync.

Projected — if Smart Cull Plan is carried out i

Breakdown by strain

Breeder alerts i

Detected litters i

Mice grouped by shared DOB + strain (heuristic — likely littermates from the same cross). Use these as built-in matched-control sources.

Breeder Builder i

Hypothetically pair a female and male — predicted Mendelian offspring distribution, historical strain litter size, and a compatibility check.

Pair pedigree & offspring tracking i

Pick an active pair to see putative offspring (inferred from DOB + offspring-strain match within the breeding window), pup-survival rate, observed sex ratio, and observed vs. expected Mendelian genotype distribution.

Breeding planner — reverse i

Tell the planner the offspring genotype you need. It searches every available ♀ × ♂ combination in the colony, ranks viable crosses by predicted target % and number of candidate mice, and suggests the best specific breeders.

Build a cohort i

Filter the live colony, hand-pick experimental mice, surface genetic controls best matched by sex and age (littermates first), and export the assembled cohort to Excel.

How to use this tab

The cards below show pre-defined cull queries. Click any card to filter the table. The table is sortable and exportable to CSV. Always verify against the live cage tags before euthanizing. Breeders and mice on active projects are excluded from "available, aged" by default.

What this tab does i

Generates a preserve / cull recommendation by combining (a) per-strain priority, (b) cohort-rebuild insurance per (strain × genotype × sex) cell, and (c) automatic rescue-donor preservation for orphan strains that can be regenerated from compound strains.

Defaults: Expand → Marrow Glo · Wind down → Adipoq-Cre, mTmG, Dendra2 (rescuable from AdipoGlo / AdipoGlo+) · Maintain → AdipoGlo, AdipoGlo+. Adjust below.

1 · Strain priorities

2 · Recommended actions before culling

Cage costs — UMich ULAM per-diem i

Live cost model based on the colony's current cage count, applying ULAM CY26 ventilated rates: $1.19/day per non-breeding cage and $2.16/day per breeding cage (effective 04/01/2026). Cages with zero mice are projected to retire and not bill.

Source: animalcare.umich.edu/business-services/rates · rate schedule revised annually.

Methodology

• Per-cage rate is set by the cage's "Has Breeders" flag in the colony software: breeding cages bill at the higher CY26 rate.
• Monthly = day × 30. Annual = day × 365. (ULAM bills daily, so partial months pro-rate.)
• "Single-housed" = 1 mouse in the cage; "Group" = 2+. Single-housed cost is structurally the same per-cage rate but reflects sub-optimal density.
• Post-cull projection assumes cages with 0 surviving mice are returned to ULAM and stop billing. If retirement is delayed by even a few days, the actual savings will be slightly less than projected for that period.
• Husbandry technician labor (specialty handling, surgeries, etc.) is billed separately at $41.15/hr regular / $61.73/hr overtime. Not included here.

Physical walkthrough reconciliation

This tab is a placeholder until the next physical walkthrough is logged. The lab uses a printed rack template (Rack_Template_YYYY-MM-DD.xlsx) to record observed cages, mouse counts, and IDs. After the walkthrough is digitized, this tab will show:

• Discrepancies — observed vs. recorded counts; missing or extra mice
• Newly located — cages found on a rack that were "Unassigned" in the colony software
• Decommissioned — cages that no longer exist in the room
• Sex / ID corrections — observed sex differs from records, or ear tag missing

Last completed walkthrough

No completed walkthrough on record.

Colony purpose

The MacDougald Lab maintains this colony to study adipocyte biology and mitochondrial transfer in adipose tissue. The active reporter and Cre lines are used to:

• Track adipocyte mitochondrial dynamics in vivo (Dendra2 photoconversion)
• Mark and lineage-trace adipocytes specifically (Adipoq-Cre)
• Visualize membrane / cellular contributions across donor-host pairs (mTmG)
• Generate triple-reporter (mTmG; Adipoq-Cre; Dendra2) cohorts for combined imaging

Strains in colony

Standard practices

• Genotyping: tail-snip → 96-well plate → Transnetyx dropbox → genotypes returned in ~3 days. Mice are genotyped at weaning, and again if an ear tag is lost.
• Husbandry: ULAM-managed barrier facility. Standard chow unless otherwise noted.
• Aging cohorts: mice are kept past 12 months only when aging is part of the experimental design. Otherwise, available mice over 12 months are flagged for cull.
• Records of truth: primary inventory lives in the lab's colony software (the Excel exports under CageListExcel.xlsx and MacLab - Brian_Mice.xlsx). Periodic physical walkthroughs reconcile the records.

Open data gaps (please flag if you know the answer)

• Specific room / building location of "Unassigned" cages — likely on additional racks not yet entered into the colony software.
• Sex of 5 mice currently recorded as "Unknown" — to be determined at next walkthrough.
• Whether any of the Adipoq-Cre-only mice (n=1) are still actively used vs. residual.

What this tab covers

This is a colony-management dashboard, so the "statistics" here are descriptive — demographic breakdowns, distributions, and breeding-performance metrics. No hypothesis tests are run on the colony itself. (Inferential statistics are reserved for downstream assays — e.g. Seahorse, microscopy, flow — and live in those project-specific dashboards.)

Methodology notes

• Age computed as today - DOB in days; rendered as months (days / 30).
• Cull queries are filters, not predictions — they surface candidates that meet the rule, but final cull decisions are made by the experimenter.
• Avg litter size = (total born / total litters); excludes pairs with zero litters from the average.
• Productivity (born/mo) = born / months_active; for active pairs only.