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Laboratory Animal Management Assistant (LAMA): a LIMS for active research colonies

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Abstract

Laboratory Animal Management Assistant (LAMA) is an internet-based system for tracking large laboratory mouse colonies. It has a user-friendly interface with powerful search capabilities that ease day-to-day tasks such as tracking breeding cages and weaning litters. LAMA was originally developed to manage hundreds of new mouse strains generated by a large functional genomics program, the Pleiades Promoter Project (http://www.pleiades.org). The software system has proven to be highly flexible, suitable for diverse management approaches to mouse colonies. It allows custom tagging and grouping of animals, simplifying project-specific handling and access to data. Finally, LAMA was developed in close collaboration with mouse technicians to ease the transition from paper- or Excel-based management systems to computerized tracking, allowing data export in a popular spreadsheet format and automatic printing of cage cards. LAMA is an open-access software tool, freely available to the research community at http://launchpad.net/mousedb.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Tammy Philippo and Dora Pak for administrative support. This work was funded by Genome Canada, Genome British Columbia, GlaxoSmithKline R&D Ltd., BC Mental Health and Addiction Services, Child & Family Research Institute, UBC Institute of Mental Health, and UBC Office of the Vice President Research. WWW was supported as a New Investigator of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and as a Scholar of the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research. EMS was supported by a Canada Research Chair. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Foundation for Innovation for both the Gene Regulation Bioinformatics Laboratory and the Mouse Laboratory of Functional Genomics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics at the Child & Family Research Institute, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V5Z 4H4, Canada

    Marko Milisavljevic, Taryn Hearty, Tony Y. T. Wong, Elodie Portales-Casamar, Elizabeth M. Simpson & Wyeth W. Wasserman

  2. Department of Medical Genetics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V5Z 4H4, Canada

    Elizabeth M. Simpson & Wyeth W. Wasserman

  3. Department of Psychiatry, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, V5Z 4H4, Canada

    Elizabeth M. Simpson

Authors
  1. Marko Milisavljevic
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  2. Taryn Hearty
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  3. Tony Y. T. Wong
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  4. Elodie Portales-Casamar
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  5. Elizabeth M. Simpson
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  6. Wyeth W. Wasserman
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Correspondence to Wyeth W. Wasserman.

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Milisavljevic, M., Hearty, T., Wong, T.Y.T. et al. Laboratory Animal Management Assistant (LAMA): a LIMS for active research colonies. Mamm Genome 21, 224–230 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00335-010-9258-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00335-010-9258-6

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