Advancing, Expanding, and Streamlining University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center Animal Resource Facility Rodent Housing Capabilities - PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The aim of this R24 proposal entitled “Advancing, Expanding, and Streamlining University of New Mexico Health Science Center Animal Resource Facility Rodent Housing Capabilities” is a request for $350,000 to: 1) Support purchase of 10 ventilated rodent racks with cages/accessories and associated mechanical and electrical construction to provide connection of these units to building exhaust and electrical in two rodent housing rooms; 2) Purchase two Class II Type A2 animal handling biosafety cabinets for use in rodent research suites. The total space affected by this project is 601 sq ft. This project builds upon improvements from renovation projects completed in 2002, 2008, 2013, 2021, 2022, and 2023, including several expansions and improvement in ABSL-2 housing capabilities. These past renovations upgraded mechanical (HVAC w/ DDC controls and environmental alarms), floors, finishes, roofing, replacing the tunnel and rack washers, three cage and equipment autoclaves, and renovated all mouse housing rooms to accommodate individually ventilated rodent racks in all mouse housing areas. This proposed project will add ventilated mouse racks to expand and consolidate animal biosafety level-2 housing in G95, a mouse housing room adjacent to the mouse breeding barrier, which supports 20 investigators. The racks that will be purchased will be compatible with existing caging with the large cages (180 in2/cage – 36 cages/rack) that can be used in any rack in the breeding barrier by interchanging with small cages (75 in2/cage) (2 small cages fit in the slot for 1 large cage). We propose the large cages to allow us to support trio breeding with adequate space per breeding female, as recommended under the 8th edition NIH guide. Second, we propose to renovate and add ventilated racks (5 racks/room) in G82B, a mouse room in the specific pathogen free (SPF) research suite. These proposed ventilated racks are single sided units with capacity of 72 cages (75 in2 /cage) per unit. This rack format will allow us to increase space in the breeding barrier by 25% (288 to 360 cages). This SPF mouse research suite currently supports 18 PI laboratories. These rooms are currently near capacity and 3 new faculty with mouse research programs have been hired and their mice breeding will be operational in ARF by January 2024. Third, we will purchase animal handling equipment for each respective animal room (G95 and G82B) as Class II Type A2 animal handling biosafety cabinets.
