Charles River Now Offering Improved Cryopreservation Services
February 9, 2009 – Unexpected events such as a contamination, natural disaster, or genetic drift can quickly decimate your animal colonies and stifle your research. To help protect both your colonies and your research, Charles River offers a variety of fast, convenient, and affordable cryopreservation options for backing up many genetically engineered mouse colonies with minimal animal requirements (2 males).
Recent improvements to our sperm cryopreservation services have greatly enhanced post-thaw viability, which allows traditional in vitro fertilization (IVF) methods to be utilized to recover live offspring and has led to a significant reduction in both the time and expense associated with the reconstitution process.
Our enhanced sperm freezing process routinely delivers post-thaw two-cell development rates of nearly 40% for colonies on a B6 background and even higher rates for many mixed background lines, a five-fold improvement over traditional methods. With this improvement, Charles River can now guarantee the recovery of any line that meets our standard quality control parameters.
In addition, we are continuing to advance our assisted reproductive technologies, including laser-assisted IVF and intracytoplasmic sperm injection, in an effort to recover virtually any frozen sperm sample, regardless of quality. This advancement can help recover lines frozen via traditional methods or lines with exceptionally poor sperm quality due to genetic mutation. Charles River is unique in offering an enhanced sperm freezing method as well as advanced recovery techniques.
The improved sperm cryopreservation process now allows us to generate large numbers of reconstituted offspring from frozen sperm in as little as three and a half months. We can thaw the frozen sperm, collect oocytes from common B6, B6 hybrids, or other selected strains, and perform IVF using this new procedure to generate anywhere from a few breeder pairs to hundreds of offspring, allowing you to restart your studies quickly. In addition, we will permanently archive your valuable strains to help protect your colonies against unexpected events in the future.
For more information about our cryopreservation services and our full portfolio of products and services, please contact us at askcharlesriver@crl.com or 1-877-CRIVER-1 or visit www.criver.com.