(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 ran

(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...