4 ms·

Adding to what josephpmay said, there's the issue of dealing genetic drift, so some groups have expensive-to-maintain systems to deal with that [0]. Which looks

by sndean 8y ago

Adding to what josephpmay said, there's the issue of dealing genetic drift, so some groups have expensive-to-maintain systems to deal with that [0]. Which looks like restarting the line every 5 generations. I have more experience with tissue culture than mice, but that's sounds surprisingly similar to passaging tissue cultures over and over [1]. Eventually you get to far out and have to start fresh, going back to stock cells. [0] https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-and-services/find-and-order-jax-mice/why-jax-mice/patented-genetic-stability-program https://www.jax.org/jax-mice-and-services/find-and-order-jax... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortalised_cell_line

Dylan16807 8y ago
Having to start over every 5 generations doesn't explain very much, though. Sure, you have to do some very expensive things to make a batch, but then four generations at a low 80 babies per female gives you two and a half million mice. So what are the other factors?
- sndean 8y ago
  (Never maintained a mouse colony before and rgejman had some good points. I've never done an experiment that used male mice before, for example.) Just some random expenses I could think of: 1) Maintaining the material to restart the line itself is pretty expensive. Expensive equipment, regular quality control, the scientists doing this maintaining would be relatively expensive. 2) The $17000 referenced in the article are "CRISPR/Cas9 injection to obtain knockout founders" I think?) are custom designed genetically modified mice to start a colony with [0]. More standard human disease-relevant db/db mice (model for diabetes) that I've used before are $500/mouse, as a reference. 3) More cynically, the labs that can actually make use of those $17000 CRISPR/Cas founder mice probably have a continuous flow of millions in funding, so they can charge whatever they want. [0] https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/jax-blog/2017/march/life-after-crispr https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/jax-blog/2017/march/li...
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    > custom designed genetically modified mice to start a colony with Ah, the idea that this is the price before amortizing across thousands of mice is perfectly reasonable.

by sndean 8y ago

Dylan16807 8y ago

Having to start over every 5 generations doesn't explain very much, though. Sure, you have to do some very expensive things to make a batch, but then four generations at a low 80 babies per female gives you two and a half million mice. So what are the other factors?

sndean 8y ago
(Never maintained a mouse colony before and rgejman had some good points. I've never done an experiment that used male mice before, for example.) Just some random expenses I could think of: 1) Maintaining the material to restart the line itself is pretty expensive. Expensive equipment, regular quality control, the scientists doing this maintaining would be relatively expensive. 2) The $17000 referenced in the article are "CRISPR/Cas9 injection to obtain knockout founders" I think?) are custom designed genetically modified mice to start a colony with [0]. More standard human disease-relevant db/db mice (model for diabetes) that I've used before are $500/mouse, as a reference. 3) More cynically, the labs that can actually make use of those $17000 CRISPR/Cas founder mice probably have a continuous flow of millions in funding, so they can charge whatever they want. [0] https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/jax-blog/2017/march/life-after-crispr https://www.jax.org/news-and-insights/jax-blog/2017/march/li...
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  > custom designed genetically modified mice to start a colony with Ah, the idea that this is the price before amortizing across thousands of mice is perfectly reasonable.