Moving mouse strains without moving mice
Peres and Roe show that laboratory mouse strains travel as commodities and sentient bodies; infection, welfare and data-quality concerns are shifting mobility from live mice toward embryos and gametes.
Source
Laboratory animal strain mobilities: handling with care for animal sentience and biosecurity
Study at a glance
- Design
- Qualitative / archival — Two-week ethnography plus supply-chain interviews on laboratory mouse strain mobility
- N
- N=23 · 23 in-depth interviews; ethnography over 2 separate weeks at UK sites
- Population
- UK laboratory animal procurement, biobank, and breeding supply-chain workers
- Outcome
- Shift from live mouse transport toward embryos/gametes under biosecurity and welfare pressures
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Longitudinal ethnography across two separate weeks (a UK institution with a biobank; a UK breeding/procurement team) plus 23 in-depth interviews with supply-chain informants, framed by animal-mobilities theory and feminist materialism.
What they found
Global repositories such as Jackson Laboratory and EMMA make strain movement normal. A journey threatens consistency. Values of biosecurity, sentient welfare and reliable knowledge assemble so that live transport is increasingly replaced by non-sentient germinal products and surrogate rederivation.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This is UK procurement ethnography, not a census of all global mouse traffic, nor an animal-welfare RCT of shipping crates. It does not measure infection rates of every journey.
Key terms
- Animal mobilities
- Hodgetts and Lorimer's lens: movement of animals as shaped by humans, plus animals' lived experience of travel.
- Strain vs animal
- Mice displaced into the genetic identity of an inbred strain; the paper follows strain journeys, not generic animals.
- Rederivation
- Implanting transported embryos/gametes into a surrogate so the strain is reborn at destination without shipping live adults.
- Biosecurity
- Practices that keep pathogens out of barrier facilities and protect the microbiological status of research animals.
Flashcards
Research intelligence for this paper
See its role on concept claims, tensions it is part of, placement history, and related discoveries.
Quiz yourself
Mouse strains travel to keep research?
Common questions
Why do mouse strains travel?
To keep biomedical models continuous, valid and accessible across institutions and countries.
What methods?
Two weeks of ethnography plus 23 interviews in UK procurement infrastructures.
What replacement is increasing?
Shipping non-sentient embryos or gametes instead of live sentient animals, then rederiving via surrogates.
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